Loosely “Isolated”, “Inexperienced”, “Overwhelmed”, Insecure, Biased

 

“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]

‘You can’t really take issue with her’ [bold in original]

[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.]

Nothing taken at face value [original emphasis]

...

Veterans of her courtroom broadly agreed on one aspect of Cannon’s judicial approach: that lawyers should expect her to sharply probe any and all assertions made in her courtroom, no matter the party, with a resistance to taking anyone at their word. 

[That's a new one for me in this constellation of symptoms. I have never been before a judge who demands you prove who you say you are.]

“She doesn’t like any litigant to tell her what she should be doing,” one of the attorneys said.

[Yes: insecurity]

Many recalled her rejecting joint motions – such as sentencing recommendations or requests to delay proceedings – even though there was no dispute between the two sides.

“You can’t assume that just because there’s agreement between the parties that she will go along,” one of the attorneys said, while describing her as an “incredibly hands on” judge “who wants to be the decision-maker of everything.” 

[So: prosecutor and defense confer (the parties conferring beforehand being one of Loose Cannon's strict rules) and agree that the current trial date is unrealistic; they file a joint motion for continuance, as it is called in Florida state courts, and the judge rejects it. I have had that happen also, but rarely. This is a great article by Noodles and the cocktail of issues that lawyers have identified to them, is well-mixed.]

...

... she doesn’t defer automatically to the assertions of prosecutors...“She doesn’t like the government to come in and play bully, steamroller,” one of the attorneys said.  

... Cannon has repeatedly taken Smith’s attorneys to task...demanding extreme specificity in whatever prosecutors are asking her for. 

[Yes, I can see that too. Demanding that requests be very granular is a way of atomizing asks so that she can give a grain or three to the other side. It is another way of avoiding making comprehensive rulings.]

Her intense scrutiny extends to whether attorneys are following granular procedural rules about how to file submissions to her court. Last month, such deficiencies prompted Cannon to rebuff a gag order request Smith filed after Trump falsely claimed the FBI had a plan to assassinate him during the Mar-a-Lago search.

She did so because she found the prosecutors had run afoul of local rules requiring them to give the opposing side ample time to consult with them on the request. On other occasions in Trump’s case, she has rejected even routine filings for minor technicalities.

[Yes, that was the latest and an extreme example of her not ruling on the substance for the form.]

[I want to say something here of my own "insight". I don't know Cannon, didn't go to Duke undergraduate or Michigan Law. I did not go to Ransom Everglades High School either but I know that school well and I see in Cannon the imprint of Ransom. It is a school unforgiving of noncompliance with the most detailed rules, a school where immense pressure is heaped on students, who become anxiety-ridden. One example: you have to be in class on time. Common rule in schools. Good rule. At Ransom they lock the door like five minutes after the bell rings for class change. One kid I knew, who became a drug addict and died by overdose, got to the door of his next class on time, put his book bag down by the door, went to get a drink of water or use the bathroom or something, and came back to find the door locked.]

The practice is reflected in several court dockets reviewed by CNN, including at least two other examples where Cannon denied motions because she said lawyers failed to appropriately confer with one another.

[But then, sometimes even when they do confer and have reached a decision, meaning Cannon doesn't have to make a decision that will piss anybody off, she rejects the joint motion and pisses everybody off.]

One of the attorneys who spoke to CNN described Cannon’s approach to policing procedural rules as, “I decide the way it’s going to be, and if you don’t want to do it the way I tell you, that’s a problem.” 

[That is the Ransom Everglades Way.]

Attorneys pointed out that she is not the only judge on the federal bench who gives no leeway for even the most minor of procedural errors, but some said that her fixation on technicalities led cases to get bogged down in minutiae.

In the Trump case, it took nearly three months for several major pretrial motions to even be docketed after the cumbersome process of litigating what would be redacted in the public filings. Seven of those requests, which seek to throw out parts of the case, remain undecided, and oral arguments have been scheduled on only some so far. 

...

Seizing on irrelevant concepts [original emphasis]

Cannon has repeatedly hauled the lawyers in Trump’s case in for hearings on pretrial disputes in the classified documents case – several of which legal experts say appear tangential or even irrelevant. 

...

 Cannon has asked questions in the Trump case that appear out of left field.

In March, for example, Cannon ordered attorneys to draft jury instructions that consider the Presidential Records Act, the federal law that requires an outgoing president to return government records to the National Archives at the end of their administration.

[That was the most bizarre thing I am aware of her doing in this case.]

Outside experts and the special counsel’s office lambasted the request as both procedurally premature and legally unsound for how it entertained a fringe theory from the Trump team. Cannon testily defended the exercise as a “genuine attempt” to understand the parties’ positions.

[I don't know "testily." I read the subsequent Order dealing with something I don't remember what. The "genuine attempt" line was in the last paragraph, having nothing whatsoever to do with the substance of the Order, an obvious tack-on to me, and defensive and insecure.]

Her orientation toward such legal rabbit holes is not distinct to the Trump case, veterans of her courtroom say. 

“She seems to seize on concepts that for one reason or another become interesting to her whether or not they’re pertinent to the case at hand – or decide that they have importance for reasons that escape the rest of the parties in the court room,” one of the attorneys said. 

[The part I quoted in the preceding post. In my first few years in the Miami-Dade prosecutor's office my office was right next door to a colleague in the same hiring class. She was very smart, extremely hard-working--and I was no slouch!--and at night, when virtually the entire office was deserted, I would come through the doors and into my office, passing hers along the way, to work on an opening statement or closing argument (I was always in trial) and Mimi would call "Benjamin?" as I walked by and then button-hole me with questions seeking my input on a nested issue in one of her own cases. I got so that I got a chill up my spine as I walked by her office; went the other way to my office sometimes; almost lost my temper at her one or two times.]

...

One attorney told CNN that if he has a case that is assigned to Cannon, he asks the opposing party whether they’d consent to allowing the cases to be handled by a [different judge]...

[Oh, good grief. That's like me trying anything to avoid Mimi.]

Ultimately, nearly every attorney CNN spoke to said that Cannon, despite the criticism, is unwavering in her beliefs about how each case in her courtroom should proceed.

As one attorney put it: “She thinks what she’s doing is correct.”

[That's the final ingredient in the cocktail: arrogant rigidity, not knowing that you don't know, certainty in certainty. It's a toxic drink.]