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View Full Version : Kelo Case: Justice's Startling Apology Adds Human Context To Tough Ruling




bobbyw24
09-20-2011, 07:57 AM
http://www.courant.com/media/photo/2011-09/64824015.jpg

By JEFF BENEDICT The Hartford Courant

September 18, 2011
If a state Supreme Court judge approaches a journalist at a private dinner and says something newsworthy about an important decision, is the journalist free to publish the statement?

I faced that situation at a dinner honoring the Connecticut Supreme Court at the New Haven Lawn Club on May 11, 2010. That night I had delivered the keynote address on the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous 5-4 decision in Kelo v. New London. Susette Kelo was in the audience and I used the occasion to tell her personal story, as documented in my book "Little Pink House."

Afterward, Susette and I were talking in a small circle of people when we were approached by Justice Richard N. Palmer. Tall and imposing, he is one of the four justices who voted with the 4-3 majority against Susette and her neighbors. Facing me, he said: "Had I known all of what you just told us, I would have voted differently."

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-justice-palmer-apology-20110918,0,5393647.story?track=rss

jmdrake
09-20-2011, 08:38 AM
From the article:


I didn't expect a response. And for weeks none came. Then the unexpected happened. Justice Palmer sent me a "personal and confidential" letter dated Nov. 8, 2010. In it he didn't dispute my account. Nor did he ask me not to publish. Rather, he provided some important context.

"Those comments," he wrote, "were predicated on certain facts that we did not know (and could not have known) at the time of our decision and of which I was not fully aware until your talk — namely, that the city's development plan had never materialized and, as a result, years later, the land at issue remains barren and wholly undeveloped." He later added that he could not know of those facts "because they were not yet in existence."

He sounds like Rick Perry apologizing for the Gardasil mandate in that he's apologizing based on particular circumstances instead of principle. The problem is that in both cases the particular circumstances prove why the decisions were wrong on principle.

fisharmor
09-20-2011, 08:52 AM
He sounds like Rick Perry apologizing for the Gardasil mandate in that he's apologizing based on particular circumstances instead of principle. The problem is that in both cases the particular circumstances prove why the decisions were wrong on principle.

Exactly. It wasn't "I'm sorry your property was taken from you", it was "I'm sorry that the thing your property was taken for never went through".
My 4-year-old daughter knows that you don't ever give an unqualified "I'm sorry". You always state what you're apologizing for, and this is why.
If I can successfully keep her away from state education efforts, she'll remain smarter than a state supreme court justice.

Pericles
09-20-2011, 09:00 AM
After the Kelo decision, it is impossible to dispute that the Constitution is dead. When the law no longer means what it says, there is no law.

ZanZibar
09-20-2011, 01:48 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7knVGpDanoU

Anti Federalist
09-20-2011, 01:55 PM
Bobby beat me to it.