Can a lawfag explain what is going on here? This goes back to 2020, but I had not seen it before, here on KF or anywhere else. Seen
here on Twitter. Where I seem to be spending far too much time following the whole Musk kerfuffle.
Axios link
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The ruling, which I have not fully read.
etc.
As an aside, Varner was convicted of possession of Cheese Pizza, surprise, surprise. The REEEing on Twitter about this case doesn't mention that small point for some reason.
Lawfag here. Not a lawyer, but trained as a paralegal and have a hobby of reading court decisions.
The fifth circuit is widely considered the most conservative federal appeals court in the country. That's just background information. I'm not going to spend time talking about the appeals court system much, because no1curr. Look at Wikipedia if you're curious.
What is important to this case is the concept of jurisdiction. Every lawsuit has to be filed in the court system that the bad thing "took place" in. There's a lot of fairly complex rules that determine which court to file in. To simplify this case is a federal case, due to the original offense being cheese pizza.
Side note: this is this chomo's
second cheese pizza conviction. He also failed to register as a sex offender after the first time. Tsk Tsk.
Back to the case at hand. The appeals court said the name change he got was
not a legal name change, because he misrepresented where he lived when he got it. Oops.
Secondly, the appeal should have been denied at the lower level, if not for that, for lack of jurisdiction in general.
Also, it did not meet certain criteria required to achieve the desired goal. The reasons are kinda technical. If you want to know, read the ruling. It doesn't matter for our purposes. He couldn't get there from here, basically.
Also, also, there's no
need for the things he was requesting. The prison system already has a mechanism for adding an assumed name/alias/preferred name. He could have told the prison "call me Henrietta" and
they would.
So, that's why his original request was denied. All perfectly reasonable and logical to me. He didn't meet jurisdiction or the rules required to make a change, so the court was right to say no.
As for the pronouns, that came down to our personal favorite issue : compelled speech and slippery slope. The judge had a lot to say on the issue, but that's what it boiled down to. Compelling speech is bad, mmkay, and once you start saying "her" and "him" you open the doors for all kinds of alternative pronouns.
I can't remember if this was touched on, but appeals are based on errors happening at the lower level - not disagreeing with a verdict. It's possible that if a lawyer was compelled to call a defendant her, and
didn't that the defendant would be able to successfully appeal their sentence based on that. That's obviously a dangerous precedent.
I didn't read the dissent. Those are not binding, nor do they create precedent. They are just pretenceous (I know that isn't spelled right) opinions. You can't really even use them in legal briefs to argue for a case in front of a judge, because they don't really count!
Edit: rulings at the appeals court level do set precedent. That means that this ruling is more or less binding on all proceedings that come after it. No one can
force a court, at least in the fifth circuit - it's been a long time since school, I can't remember if this now applies to the whole us or that's only Supreme Court rulings, my apologies Frens - to compel pronouns. A court can still use preferred pronouns as a
courtesy, judges basically having the final say in their courtroom.
But, where this comes in is let's say there's a nasty rape case. By the time it comes to trial, because it's one of the
rare ones that does, the Defendant is now a ~woman~. His lawyer asks the court to call him a her. The victims' lawyer can submit a motion to the judge citing this case as precedent and say this victim is traumatized enough, blah blah, mental health, plznob00ly. The judge can now rule no without the defendant being able to REEEEEEEEEEEE about it.
That concludes my sperg on precedent.