Rov_Scam
8hr ago
Except no such category of cases exists. There are categories of cases that are more likely to get an opinion, but that's no guarantee that you're going to get one, even if the trial judge really likes to hear himself talk. I have had a few cases where the judge wanted us to provide additional briefs on a relatively new argument we were making and I thought he might issue an opinion but he didn't, even though he seemed interested in the legal basis of a hearsay exception that he made up himself.
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
Let me offer a fanciful hypothetical (perhaps not as fanciful as a hypo about the Alien Enemies Act and the British invasion). Imagine that a federal judge decided that he would no longer offer any rationales for his decisions. He would simply invite the parties to court, listen to their arguments, and announce a judgment for the plaintiff or the defendant from the bench, and then adjourn court. Following that oral order, the clerk would enter a judgment for the prevailing party. The judge explains that he only needs to issue an order, and no statute requires him to explain his reasoning. The Circuit Court consistently reverses this judge's rulings, and grants writs of mandamus, but the judge continues his practice.
Sometimes I wish the Volokh conspiracy contributors wouldn't make it so patently obvious that they never practiced law a day in their lives.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
No, one wouldn't expect that. Orders from trial courts seldom come with opinions. I file hundreds of motions per year and exactly zero have ended in a written opinion. If I'm lucky I might get an explanation from the bench. Usually the judge doesn't say anything but that he'll take it under advisement and he signs an order prepared by counsel a week later.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
Orders from trial courts only rarely contain opinions. The judge decided to write a brief opinion critical of the administration from putting him in a position where he had to issue the order. Why? Because he can. Judges make performative comments like this all the time, it just usually happens during motion arguments when nobody is there but the court staff and the attorneys.
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
The 1948 Act's original purpose had nothing to do with churches; those attacks didn't start until the 1960s. It was originally passed in 1870 in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment and was revised in 1948 after renewed intimidation campaigns to prevent blacks from voting. I'm not aware of any cases that don't involve the right to vote, though there may be some. That particular count fails for two reasons. The first is that the statute requires a specific intent to violate a particular right. There's no evidence that the protestors specifically entered the church because they wanted to prevent the congregation from being able to practice their religion. To the contrary, pretty much everyone agrees, and the indictment even admits, that the intent of the disruption was to protest ICE; interfering with a church service was an incidental consequence. If I beat a guy up and he can't vote the next day because he's in the hospital, it certainly interferes with a civil right, but it's a lot different than if I beat him up specifically to prevent him from voting.
The more crucial reason, though, that the statute doesn't apply here, is because it generally doesn't apply to rights where the only constitutional protection is from state action. If a group of people is protesting on the street and counterprotestors show up and disrupt the protest, they're certainly interfering with the first group's First Amendment rights in much the same way that the anti-ICE protestors were interfering with the practice of religion when they disrupted the church service, but there's no civil rights violation there. The same holds true if it were a sanctioned protest on private property (say, in a shopping center parking lot) that was being disrupted.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
I don't know that a trespassing charge would stick here. I can't speak for the particularities of Minnesota law, but PA has three basic categories of trespass:
- Criminal Trespass, the most serious, which involves breaking into buildings.
- Simple Trespass, the least serious, which involves entering property with the intent of causing damage to the premises
- Defiant trespass, which involves either entering property that you're clearly meant to be kept out of (like if it was posted or there was a fence), or not leaving at the request of the owner
The only category that would apply here would be defiant trespass, since the church was ostensibly open to the public. In the video, the pastor politely asks Lemon to leave and then walks away. Lemon leaves 7 minutes later. Again, I can't speak for Minnesota, but most of the cases where someone is prosecuted for defiant trespass in PA involve someone ignoring repeated demands to leave, and then remaining there until the police show up. Realistically, the police aren't going to prosecute based on video evidence or testimony unless they're in a very small town with nothing else to do. When I had my own practice I would occasionally get calls about people who caught poachers on their property and wanted to sue them. In these cases they always called the police, who weren't about to run plates and arrest people who had already left (they were usually caught coming out of the woods). Lemon might be guilty of defiant trespass withing the strict letter of the law, but he might not, and the case is blurry enough that most police and prosecutors don't think it's worth the hassle. In PA refusing an order to leave is a misdemeanor which will probably get you six months probation. I'd expect that if a prosecutor were willing to push a case like this he'd probably bargain it down to a summary offense, which would be in line with ignoring a posted sign.
It's common, but I don't think you realize how many motions are filed in a typical case. Not many come with opinions, even the contested ones
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