I confused Bybee with another judge, reversing the order of events.Bildungsroman wrote:So you think he's unethical because he took a position you disagree with? Are you now backing off your earlier claim that "He has been known to have conflicts of interest yet refuse to step down from cases, accept perceived "gifts", etc."? Did you only make that apparently unsupported claim about gifts and conflicts because you knew your real reasoning would make it clear you're a partisan halfwit?PDaddy wrote:You found nothing? Ok, I will post it. There are people in the legal community who wanted him disbarred back in 2009.
I did some research on Bybee last year because a client at a law firm (where I was working at the time) had her case go before Bybee on appeal.
Like I said before, being courteous and a good teacher of black letter law is not enough.
So to the extent that I had Bybee confused with the other judge, you can say you are correct. To the extent that Bybee proceeded to accept from Latham (a firm that tried many cases in his court) $3.4M in legal services for free, my argument is no less potent. That does speak to a breakdown in his ethics.
The fact that he had to recuse himself doesn't lessen the probability that Latham gets preferable treatment in the courtrooms of Bybee's and Bush's cronies. The favor created a prejudicial effect once it was made public, but it had to be publicized.
You can't penalize Latham for doing a perceived "good deed". Should they have offered him free legal services? No. But big law forms have an obligation to do pro bono work; nowhere is it written that the client cannot be a judge. That leaves it up to judges to decide whether to accept the services. Moreover, Bybee only recused himself from Latham's cases because of public pressure.
The message to other firms is this: "If you go against Latham in a courtroom with a Bybee cronie, you are likely to lose".
If you guys don't see the mess he created by accepting that gift, that's pretty stubborn of you.
My issue with the waterboarding memo had little to do with waterboarding itself. If Bybee's claims had support, we would be talking politics, not ethics. Here, Bybee and Yoo used unfounded data to support waterboarding and then Bybee knowingly wrote a memo that used as its basis that false data. That's another ethics violation. Fwiw, I did oppose waterboarding, and I believe the U.S. should have been charged and sanctioned for it based on human rights violations, but that's an entirely different issue. You don't enable an administration to engage in those violations by lying to the public.
And if holding judges to the highest ethical standards makes me a partisan halfwit, I'll take that every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Bybee supporters are no less partisan than am I, that's for sure.