“It’s very lonely,” Senior Judge Paul C. Huck told CNN of Fort Pierce, a small fishing and citrus community on the edge of the Southern District of Florida where Cannon is the only federal judge. “It’s a pretty sleepy town with a pretty sleepy courtroom.”
That's Cannon's courthouse and a picture of a more stark, sterile, rigid, isolated, lonely place you'd be hard put to come by.
…
Several attorneys who have practiced in front of Cannon…pointed to her isolation as one explanation for her conduct. Cannon’s solitary post in the Fort Pierce courthouse…deprives her of the informal, day-to-day interactions with more seasoned judges who sit at the other courthouses and could offer her advice...
They also said Cannon’s lack of trial experience, both as a lawyer and a judge, is apparent. … on the bench, she’s only presided over a handful of criminal trials – and Huck took over one of them.
For this account of Cannon’s judicial demeanor, CNN spoke to ten attorneys who have had cases – both criminal and civil – before her. …
To corroborate their characterizations of Cannon’s approach, CNN reviewed the public dockets of scores of cases that have traveled through her courtroom.
… they…said that some of her habits that have raised eyebrows in Trump’s case have plagued her approach from the bench more generally.
Those tendencies include a penchant for letting irrelevant legal questions distract from core issues, a zero-tolerance approach to any technical defects in filings, and a struggle with docket management that allows the type of pretrial disputes that other judges would decide in weeks go unresolved for months.
[This is all so familiar in certain lawyers and judges, those who are very capable and intelligent but cannot see the forest for the trees. Part of it is their mindset but part also is fear. They don’t want to get to the core issues because they are intimidated by them.]
“She is not efficient,” said one attorney who practices in south Florida. “She is very form over substance.”
[That’s it: form over substance because the substance scares her.]
Another attorney described her as “indecisive.”
[Exactly]
A third attorney who’s had cases before Cannon said, “She just seems overwhelmed by the process.”
[Yes]
[Yep]
…
Her approach as a jurist – detail-obsessed to the point of tedious – appears uniquely prone to being exploited by a defense team eager to delay the case. And the complicated system Cannon has set up for redacting public filings has only exacerbated a backlog of unresolved issues.
[She ignores the substantive responsibilities of trial management, because she is intimidated by having to make big decisions, for “complicated”, technical requirements of her own creation.]
She still has not decided foundational questions that will determine whether the Trump case will go to trial. Marginal issues clutter her docket…
[See? That’s what a person like her, and that’s not a throwaway line, there are lawyers and judges just like her, do.]
Some lawyers…described her as latching onto abstract, academic questions at the expense of the type of on-the-fly decision-making required by trial judges that keeps litigation moving along.
… special counsel prosecutors are now learning firsthand the wrath that they can incur from the judge for seemingly minor discrepancies in their filings, and they have drawn Cannon’s ire for pushing her to move more quickly to resolve the substantive pretrial issues that have slowed the pace of the case to a crawl.
…
Defense attorneys CNN spoke to described Cannon as a judge who gives minimal deference to defendants and as a “notoriously” tough sentencer. To that end, the long leash she’s given the Trump team in the pretrial phase of the case has struck a chord with them.
“She’s certainly not sympathetic to most defendants, and she’s certainly playing a different game with the current defendant before her,” another lawyer told CNN, in reference to Trump.
[It’s not “only” isolation, inexperience, insecurity, a lost-in-the-weeds temperament, it is also corruption, she is biased in favor of Trumpie.]