Summary of WT Appeal Brief in Conti Case

by Chaserious 79 Replies latest watchtower child-abuse

  • problemaddict
    problemaddict

    Yes Chaserious they do. For suggesting that anything short of going to the police was irresponsible and wreckless, I was "unfriended" on facebook,a nd he deleted his FB account. No doubt he is aware of the dangers the internet can bring.

    Dude was mid 30's, married to a nice girl, friends with people I respect, not a dummy.......but man when you hand over your ability to think to fear, you just lose so much.

  • ÁrbolesdeArabia
    ÁrbolesdeArabia

    "So, the basis of the WT's argument is that normally, people don't have any responsibility to warn other people of danger, if they did not directly create the danger and the danger is at the hands of someone else. Of course, warning someone is the nice thing to do and people might feel better about themselves, but there is no legal liability for not warning. For example, if you have a relative who has been convicted for child abuse and the relative is dating a woman with small children, you would have no legal duty to warn her about your relative, even if you had the opportunity to do so, and even though most self-respecting people would probably warn her (this example is my editorial, not part of the brief). Some of you may also remember the David Cash case, (the famous "bad samaritan") for a sad reminder about how legally you don't usually have to help anyone. "

    We were told our whole life it was our job to warn the World and help the Little Flock dab ink from the ink-horn from the book of Ezekiel, now it's never been anyone's job to warn of a possible danger? Watchtower speak's with forked tongue! Thank's Chaserious!

    I know for a fact there were brothers who were confessed child sex offenders the Watchtower Society knew about in 1996-2005 who remained as elders in place. How can they lie like this?

  • mind blown
    mind blown

    Question? In your opening thread, you mentioned...

    " I spent a few months working for an appeals court judge (not in California), which sometimes involved reading briefs like this one, or portions of a brief, and writing a summary memo for the judge about the key issues and a recommendation on how the case should turn out."

    Are you saying your recommendation could actually influence/sway a judge on how a case should turn out? And if so, wouldn't that in itself jepordize an appeals outcome, only because you're still a student of the law and not officially an atty? Is this common place?

  • mind blown
  • Juan Viejo2
    Juan Viejo2

    Breakfast of Champions asked:

    "Did I miss it, or has anyone leaked Watchtower's appeal "brief" online?"

    The full set of documents can be found at http://jwactivists.org/blog/watchtower-appeals-the-conti-lawsuit/

    Downloadable PDFs

    JV

  • breakfast of champions
    breakfast of champions

    Awesome! Cool. Thanks JV

  • Chaserious
    Chaserious

    Mind blown wrote:

    Are you saying your recommendation could actually influence/sway a judge on how a case should turn out? And if so, wouldn't that in itself jepordize an appeals outcome, only because you're still a student of the law and not officially an atty? Is this common place?

    All appeals judges, and many trial judges, have law clerks, who are usually less than a year out of law school (and often not yet admitted to the bar), or sometimes 2-3 years out, who in most chambers write bench memoranda with a recommendation on how the judge should rule. Of course, ultimately the decision belongs to the judge. Further, once the decision is reached, most judges have a clerk draft the written opinion and then edit it after the clerk drafts it. There are some judges who write their own opinions, but it's a minority.

    As far as whether law students working in chambers can do the same thing, it varies by judge. In talking to other students who worked in judges' chambers, some would write memos for the clerks instead of directly to the judge. But there's nothing wrong with it per se. The judge can still go against the recommendation or read the briefs and research cases on his or her own. My judge didn't always end up voting the way my memo came out. I can think of one instance where I think my research was influential, in that I think the judge was originally inclined to go the other way.

    Another interesting practice in this vein is the cert pool, which is a practice used by the US Supreme Court where each petition to have a case heard by the Supreme Court is read by one law clerk, who then writes a summary memo that the Justices read. Some have criticized the practice of a clerk who is a very recent law school graduate being the only one to read the full petition and exercising a lot of influence on whether the case gets heard by the Supreme Court or not.

    Edit: I don't know why the whole post is italics. It won't let me change it. Only the first paragraph is the quote from a prior post.

    [Edited by jgnat in HTML]

  • mind blown
    mind blown

    Thank you for your response. Interesting.

    Do you think this practice could ever be challenged?

  • Chaserious
    Chaserious

    Yeah, I was a little surprised at first about the amount of work done behind the scenes by others. In my own experience, I think as an intern, the judge tended to assign me cases to research that weren't very complicated, or where the judge thought it was an easy call as to how it would turn out. The clerks did the more complicated issues.

    I don't think that it could be challenged. As long as the judge is ultimately responsible for the vote and/or opinion, it seems that most judges have so many cases that it would be impossible for them to research, write and edit every opinion by themselves. Federal appeals judges as an example, all have 3 paid law clerks, each making in the area of $60,000 per year plus benefits. If the court system has decided to spend that much on a support system for each judge, I'm sure they don't expect them to just make copies and get the judge's coffee.

  • jgnat
    jgnat

    Doling out the grunt work to the apprentices is an ancient practice and unlikely to change. How else are the future Supreme Court Justices going to get their practice in?

    From an article on Renaissance artistry,

    "The best students would assist the master with important commissions, often painting background and minor figures while the Master painted the main subjects."

    http://www.renaissanceconnection.org/artistslife.html

Share this

Google+
Pinterest
Reddit