Unless she has been living on Mars since Bush let Libby walk, Judge Amy J. St. Eve knowingly perjured herself in her own courtroom yesterday:
CHICAGO, July 11 — A onetime grocer from suburban Chicago who was convicted of lying in a civil lawsuit about his ties to the militant Palestinian organization Hamas was sentenced on Wednesday in Federal District Court to 21 months in prison …
Judge Amy J. St. Eve said the sentence was meant as a deterrent to others who might seek to undermine the “truth-telling function” of the judicial system.
“It is important to promote respect for the law,” Judge St. Eve said. “You cannot lie in a courtroom.”
Well, if one wanted to take up for the judge, she could argue that a "grand jury room" is not technically a "court room". Scooter never testified.
Lying to a grand jury is apparently OK. Just don't lie to the "court". Mere citizens who make up a grand jury apparently don't count anymore. We've gotten so used to it anyway.
Libby was tried and sentenced for perjury. Rule of law was upheld. It is disappointing that Bush saw fit to exercise executive privilege and commute the court's sentence, but that was a power granted to him by the Constitution, so it was not a concern to the court system. Technically, Judge St. Eve did not lie. Of course, this is lawyer weaseleze, but that is of course what a courtroom boils down to in far too many cases :-).
- Badtux the Legal Penguin
Posted by: Badtux on July 12, 2007 10:05 PMJust doing her part by adding the Chicago Federal courthouse to the country's long and rapidly growing list of irony free zones.
Posted by: markg on July 13, 2007 2:22 AMI know she didn't commit perjury in the same legal sense that Libby did. But I, like George W. Bush, answer to a higher law. However I have now discovered that even in the eyes of that higher law, she probably didn't commit perjury, intent being an element of perjury in both codes.
When I was writing the post, I clicked on the handy link in the right-hand column of Bad Attitudes called "Who Put That Asshole on the Court?" The link turned out to be broken, but I just plowed forward anyway in blissful ignorance of just who the hell Judge St. Eve was. Today I found that the URL had been changed, and accessed the Federal Judicial Center's directory.
Turns out that Judge St. Eve was one of the attack dogs on Kenny Boy Starr's "legal" team. After the lynching of Clinton failed, she was rewarded with a job as an assistant U.S. attorney. She next became counsel to a drug company, followed by a federal judgeship at the hands of George W. Bush, who was no doubt acting on the advice of famed legal scholar Karl Rove.
Until learning all this, I had hoped that Judge St. Eve was perhaps like committing like irony from the bench when she talked about the sanctity of the law. But now it seems more likely that, given her history, she believed her own shit. This would acquit her of perjury on grounds that she was incapable of grasping that she was lying, being full of KoolAid.
Posted by: Jerry Doolittle on July 13, 2007 10:44 AM