This Is The Best They Can Do?

One has to almost feel sorry for the WMC. In the last race for a seat on the state Supreme Court, they bought their very own Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, Annette Ziegler, who took her place on the bench and immediately brought a smog of corruption with her.

This year, they had to settle for a seventh round draft choice in Michael Gableman. Not only that, but they are requiring the aid of McBride to help try to help this unqualified candidate win his election. We already know that McBride has difficulties with the concept of journalism, even though she is allegedly a teacher in that fine art. For her to try to tackle law...Well, even a super lawyer apparently couldn't help her with that endeavor.

To illuminate this point, I had asked the illustrious illusory one to peruse the post and enlighten us all. Even though very busy, he did give us a few moments of his time to give her post a cursory lookthrough and gave us this:

Eschewing scare italics for scare boldface, McBride goes on to say:

Butler makes a serious error in the law by misclassifying two sexual predator cases as criminal cases (Brown and Bush). Under the law, sexual predator cases are defined as civil commitments expressly so they pass Constitutional [sic] double jeopardy protections.

First of all, the list of cases McBride provides contains three "Browns," but she doesn't tell us which one Butler's "serious error in the law" arises from.

In the other case, State v. Bush, Butler wrote for a unanimous court in favor of upholding the constitutionality of Chapter 980 provisions against the motions of the defendant, who was previously deemed a sexually violent person. Furthermore, the issues addressed by the Supreme Court turn almost entirely on the defendant's sexually violent behavior, that is, criminal behavior.* As a matter of fact, Butler specifically and explicitly rejects Bush's claim that he is no longer dangerous, despite the evidence Bush presents.

Generally speaking, Bush is about as "anti-criminal" as they come. (That's a borrowing from McBride's own parlance, where "pro-constitutional" equates to "pro-criminal.")

Secondly, while Chapter 980 does not contain criminal statutes per se, you don't get to be a sexually violent person under Chap. 980 unless you've been convicted of a sexually violent offense, a conviction which is, obviously, a criminal conviction. McBride's distinction, in this context, is bordering on the graspingly ridiculous.Thirdly, if McBride's distinction is accepted, then Gableman can't criticize Butler's record with respect to criminal cases where they involve Chapter 980 commitments, which would pretty much gut the central point of his entire campaign. "Louis Butler, soft on civil commitments!!!1" doesn't play quite as well with the mugs.

You can read the rest here.