And that practitioner would be me, who was unable to respond to last year’s attacks by Wingnut propaganda outlet Breitbart’s on Judge O because of a matter I had before him.
First a point of disclosure, I’m not a lawyer and never will be. Further I am soon to announce my retirement from the pro se practice of law. My experience as a pro se litigant is somewhat unique because a frequent joke actual lawyers tell is that the Latin translation for pro se is “already lost” and that is true for the overwhelming majority. That was not quite true for me. I’ll have more on that in a week or so.
What is true is that before anyone, pro se or not appears before a Court it is a darn good idea to learn as much about the judge as is possible. I did lots of digging back in 2015 but not being a legal profession insider has its disadvantages because there is only so much information available in the internet. Judge O, unlike seemingly many of the other local jurists did not grow up on Second Street in Gulfport where I know lots of folks.
That said I did find one tidbit from a now defunct Mississippi website and that tidbit was that was Judge Ozerden was the kind of Judge that “let the lawyers lawyer”. What that means is if the case is a switchblade fight between the litigants, every one of them better bring some steel to the party or suffer the consequences. Lawyers are officers of the Court and the good ones take the charge very seriously. That means lawyers resolving a case among themselves (i.e. settling) is always a very favored outcome.
My experience before Judge O. was that he is exactly as advertised. In fact my adversaries and I maybe even went a shade above and beyond with our knife fight as the Court used the term “gamesmanship” in an order issued later in the case that it used to describe the scrap. (Just because the lawyers are allowed to lawyer in Judge O’s Courtroom doesn’t mean the Judge or the Magistrate are blind to what the parties are doing.)
This brings me back to the Wingnuts and their heartburn with Judge O:
“No violation of religious liberty and conscience rights in recent years is more infamous than when Obamacare ordered the nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor to violate Church teachings,” says Susan B. Anthony President Marjorie Dannenfelser exclusively to Breitbart News, referring to the judge’s ruling in Catholic Diocese of Biloxi v. Sebelius. “Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden has utterly failed to protect people of faith against Obamacare’s assault on religious liberty and conscience rights and does not deserve a promotion to the Fifth Circuit.”
Jackson lawyer Phillip Thomas fills in the blanks that Breitbart didn’t and the bottom line is when alt right Wingnuts decry agenda driven rulings, they are talking about every agenda but their own: Continue reading “Eating their own: One practitioner’s take about last year’s Alt-Right attacks on Judge Ozerden”