There is no doubt that the news out of the US Supreme Court has been abyssal this year, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, this doesn’t necessarily reflect on the rest of the US courts, where there have been a number of good rulings.
Among these are the nearly $1.5 billion rulings against Alex Jones, the sanctions against Trump lawyers, and a course a number of cases involving Trump, where the judges have allowed the cases to go forward.
Now, a couple of new pieces of good news can be added:
A judge on Tuesday ordered Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, two right-wing conspiracy theorists behind robocalls that sought to intimidate Black voters here out of casting mail-in ballots in the 2020 presidential election, to spend 500 hours registering voters in low-income neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C., area.
Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge John Sutula placed each on two years of probation, fined each $2,500 and ordered them to wear GPS ankle monitors with home confinement beginning at 8 p.m. each day for the first six months of their probation.
Sutula, 71, said that most of the civil rights advances in the United States have occurred in his lifetime. He compared the men’s effort to those who used violence to suppress southern Black voters in the 1960s.
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the rightwing Oath Keepers militia, has been found guilty of seditious conspiracy, a charge arising from the attack on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump.
Rhodes and co-defendant Kelly Meggs are the first people in nearly three decades to be found guilty of the rarely used civil war-era charge at trial. The trial was the biggest test yet for the US justice department in its efforts to hold accountable those responsible for the attack that shook the foundations of US democracy.
This appears to be a clear cut case of justice prevailing – if this wasn’t a case of seditious conspiracy, what is? But some times these things are harder to prove in court than would appear logical, so we should be glad that the US justice department managed to get the convictions.
I almost envy Judge John Sutula – he lives in such a world of optimism.
Wohl (not a “scrum” – pls drop the “r”!) & Burkman will probably achieve a world’s-record low in voter registration, and will likely antagonize enough DC residents to need police protection in DC neighborhoods.
Or maybe Sutula thinks a little more like I do, and sent them to those streets to remedy the lack of a death penalty option for election fraud cases.
For some reason I hadn’t seen your comment before now – thank you for pointing out my spelling error. I blame my field of work for that.