“I still like beer”
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I don’t know why this has become a plane thread, but I’m not going to argue.
How about a ‘whistling tit’?
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Supermajority in the Senate?
To say that it is better looking than the Blackburn Beverly is to damn it with rather faint praise.
Can anyone tell me if “this judge is demonstrably shit at their job, with a well-publicised track record of mind-bendingly bizarre rulings” be grounds for a mistrial or change of venue/judge?
I hope it is, because it’d be fun to see what happens if literally every lawyer appearing before her from now on immediately files for a mistrial - and hilarious if it works.
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Short answer is no with a but. Unlike a lot of state courts, there has to be good cause to substitute a judge or change venue. 28 U.S. Code § 455 lays out the grounds for when a judge may and/or must recuse herself, but unfortunately being a shit judge isn’t one of them.
As far as mistrials go, less than 5% of federal cases ever go to trial and the grounds for that are quite high, and in the vast majority of cases an appeal of the shit ruling is the remedy and not a mistrial.
Short of impeachment by Congress, there are very few remedies available when an Article III judge is just generally shit at her job, and impeachment is an incredibly rare outcome that has, to my knowledge, always required criminal conduct: stuff like bribery or perjury. Most of the time, blistering Circuit opinions that point out incredibly sloppy (at best) decisions are enough to humiliate a judge and produce some changes, but just like in a lot of other contexts over the last seven years, we’re seeing what happens when the people involved lack the capacity for shame.
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