From The Manhattan Contrarian the other day…(Yeah, I’m just getting caught up on my reading):
You have probably seen that last week an appellate court in New York (Appellate Division, First Department) reversed the civil judgment against President Trump where he had been ordered to pay a fine in excess of $450 million to the state of New York. This case originated during Trump’s first term, as part of then newly-elected New York Attorney General Letitia James’s campaign promise to take down the President. … The Appellate Division’s decision was finally issued last week. It is a highly unusual document, and you can see why it took so long to write. First of all, there is no majority opinion. That is close to unheard of from any court, although there are small numbers of examples. (The most famous case of all time without a majority opinion is the 1977 Bakke decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on the issue of affirmative action in university admissions, a case which screwed up the law of university admissions for decades.). I am unaware of any prior decision of the First Department Appellate Division without a majority opinion, although there may be one somewhere. Instead of any majority opinion, the panel of five judges split 2, 2 and 1, with the various opinions dissecting and criticizing each other.
Second, the whole thing aggregates some 323 pages. Afficionados of the First Department will recognize how crazy this is: this court processes a huge volume of business, between 2000 and 3000 cases per year, and the large majority of its decisions are one-paragraph summary affirmances of the court below. Only a small minority of this court’s cases get a decision of as much as ten pages.
While the decision is fractured, all five judges agreed on one thing: the $450+ million fine (now exceeding $500 million with ongoing interest accruals), is vacated in its entirety. The fine is not reduced to some smaller amount, such as $1 million or even $1000, which was an option the judges could have adopted, but rather it is eliminated entirely. And they also unanimously agree on a rationale: the amount constitutes an “excessive fine” under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Because of the unanimity on this issue, and because the rationale is based in the U.S. Constitution rather than New York law, it is highly unlikely for any large fine against Trump to be imposed in subsequent appeals. The case can be appealed to New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. But for that court to reverse and re-instate a large fine, it would need to overrule a unanimous five-judge court below on this point. And then, because this is an issue of U.S. constitutional law, such a decision would be subject to review by the U.S. Supreme Court, which would be highly unlikely to affirm a large civil fine in this absurd and made-up case. The last thing the New York Court of Appeals would want is to get slapped down by the Supremes in this case, particularly trying to impose a large fine on an absurd basis upon the sitting President of the United States. So I see almost no likelihood of any fine against Trump in this case getting re-instated in subsequent appeals.
Without the fine, the case is no longer of any particular significance in the grand scheme of things. Letitia James’s signature effort, the thing on which she based her claim for office, has come to nothing.
But in fact it’s worse than that. Of the five judges, three would reverse not just the fine, but the whole thing. Two of those would reverse various of the decisions of the highly partisan Justice Engoron and then send the case back for a new trial; and the third, Justice David Friedman, argues that the case should be thrown out entirely.
That would have been the proper outcome, here… and frankly, James should be disbarred over the matter. But there’s the rub:
And how about our two big bar associations, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and the New York State Bar Association? I have looked many times, and I can find no statement from either criticizing Ms. James for misusing her office to try to take out a political adversary.
James openly promised in her campaign to misuse the power of the office she was seeking. Her law license should be pulled for that. And more, since this is an issue of public trust, she should be jailed for her actions and were this a fair world, she most certainly would have been. James in chains, mopping floors at Albion (A state Women’s correctional facility) seems appropriate to me. As things are, we doubtless will see her claim the ruling is biased, (Racist, of course) ) I further point up that it’s only humiliation is SHE and her fellow Democrats believe it to be.
That said, all is not lost, here. That’s because in truth, the larger story here is the damage both short and long term to the Democrat party. As one of the commenters says:
Watching the Democrats pull back the curtain on the NY legal system has been enlightening indeed. I doubt they realize the immeasurable damage they have done to their own institutions. Companies and wealthy institutions continue to flee the state in pursuit of apolitical rule of law elsewhere, and Democrats have no idea why. The entire nation has seen how they were fine with Donald Trump until he put an (R) after his name, at which point they immediately tried to destroy him. In fact, nearly all of his most important allies are former Democrats, an interesting dynamic. But I’m sure that dying party will continue to disintegrate by taking this and other issues up for inevitable losses at the Supreme Court. If that doesn’t put them in a hurt locker for decades to come, electing a socialist Hamas mayor surely will. At this point it’s difficult not to burst into laughter every time the Party of Science claims they’re the smart ones.
And I think it fair to remind my readers of the left spending the last 6 months screaming about Trump supposedly weaponizing government against his political opponents Consider the current fraud cases being mounted against James, Cook and Pencilneck Shiff. I’ve said it a thousand times…. when Democrats make an accusation against someone, it is invariably what they themselves are doing.
