Justice by Wise Latina Woman

Sonia Sotomayor boasts that the full-orbed experiences gained by and empathy demonstrated as a result of merely existing as a "Wise Latina Woman" will likely produce better results than those presided over by similarly situated Yale law grads, but ever so unfortunately white guy, judges.

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion."

Contrary to the Obama administration's assertions, this statement was not merely an unfortunate choice of words on the part of Sotomayor, but rather is a statement which she (proveably) used in at least three public, prepared speeches.

Apparently, "reaching better conclusions" doesn't even remotely resemble what the average guy on the street would consider to be a close approximation of "justice."

Jeffrey Deskovic was falsely accused of rape when he was 17 years old. By now, if you have been reading this blog, you know the drill: he is assumed to be guilty because all men are, of course, rapists, the police violated his fifth amendment rights, he was taken to trial despite hair fiber evidence and DNA evidence that didn't match, prosecutorial misconduct followed, yada yada.

In other words, a typical rape case.

And Deskovic was, of course, convicted (I didn't really have to tell you that part, did I?). Follows a series of appeals. Or attempted appeals, at least. Because in one instance, his appeals lawyer got some bad advice from a court clerk and missed a filing deadline by four days. The prosecutor showed up to argue that the 96 hours in question were somehow prejudicial to the interest of the people of New York.

Funny, isn't it, how DNA and hair fiber evidence that doesn't match isn't detrimental to the people's interests, but a 96-hour filing deadline is? But I digress....

So Deskovic's attorney requested a ruling of "equitable tolling," which would have allowed the appeal to continue based on the fact that the missed deadline was the fault of the court itself and would have recognized the extreme weight of both the proceedings and the evidence. After all, which is more weighty - the possibility of an innocent man spending the remainder of his life in prison, or an arbitrary filing deadline that was, after all, missed on the advice of the court itself.

You guessed it! The court denied the appeal, which forced another appeal into the court of one Sonia Sotomayor. Thank God! Because the empathy and wisdom of Latina women is, of course, well-known.

Undoubtedly, when given a choice between merely procedural matters not the fault of an appellant and the substantive justice due to an innocent man, Sotomayor would utilize her "richness of experience as a Wise Latina Woman" and come up with the proper result, right?

Deskovic writes at Politico.com,

Sotomayor and a colleague upheld the lower court’s ruling, writing that “the alleged reliance of Deskovic’s attorney on verbal misinformation from the court clerk constitutes excusable neglect that does not rise to the level of an extraordinary circumstance. Similarly, we are not persuaded that equitable tolling is appropriate based upon Deskovic’s contentions that the four-day delay did not prejudice respondent, petitioner himself did not create the delay, his situation is unique and his petition has substantive merit.”

A second appeal to her court resulted in the same decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear my case. I remained in prison for six more years, with no appeals left....

After six years, Deskovic obtained representation again, that attorney once again investigated the DNA evidence and found a match in a national DNA database. Deskovic, after serving 16 years total (and six years after experiencing the empathy of a Wise Latina Woman) was released. Today, he is an activist for victims of false imprisonment.

Learn the lesson: The much-vaunted "empathy" sought by Barack Obama, and located in Sonia Sotmayor, is not an empathy that focuses on entering into human suffering in order to ensure that proper and moral legal decisions are made resulting in some close approximation of justice. It is rather a politically-correct narrowmindedness which, freed from the constraints of morality, logic, reason, and law will consistently grant to liberal special interests the desired result, no matter the demands of actual justice.

And what desired result is more sacrosanct to the perverted postmodern mind than the feminist claim that there simply are no false convictions of rape? Women don't lie, police don't manufacture evidence, and all men are beastly perverts anyway. On procedural grounds or otherwise, we ought to just lock all the men up anyway (Obama excepted, of course), because if they have not yet raped, they are even now in the process of scoping out their prey.