Saturday Sentinel blogging
Today's paper has this front-page story about yesterday's developments in the lawsuit of News Sentinel Editor Jack McElroy against Knox County Commission. Although the news itself is potentially bad for the people of Knox County, the story is written in a straightforward, unbiased way. It unpacks a complicated set of motions and legal arguments and distills them down to the central issue: what will the jury be instructed to do when they reconvene on Monday and begin deliberations?
The bad news for Knox Countians is this:
A key debate was whether jurors would be asked to decide if each commissioner deliberated or decided in secret in each of the 12 appointments.
Fansler turned aside Chief Deputy Law Director Mary Ann Stackhouse's bid to poll jurors on whether each of the 19 commissioners violated the law. But he approved her request that jurors be asked whether the law was violated in each of the appointments.
"I'm going to do it office by office," Fansler said of the interrogatories.
His judicial OK opens the door for Stackhouse to later argue that some appointments be spared from any injunction that might result from the jury's findings.
This means that jurors will not simply be able to say that all twelve of the appointments made on Black Wednesday are contaminated merely because back-room deliberation occurred on one or more appointments; instead, they'll have to conclude whether a Sunshine Law violation occurred on each of the twelve. This could mean that some of the appointed officers keep their seats, while others might lose theirs. Anyone hoping for a do-over of the whole appointment process will be disappointed if the jury doesn't return an affirmative verdict on all twelve. Frankly, that would suck. In my opinion, all of the twelve appointees need to go, and they need to go en masse. A complete do-over of the appointment process is the only way to redeem the integrity of all twelve offices.
The good news for News Sentinel readers is that the article presents Friday's debates in a manner that simply outlines the legal arguments made by both sides, without favor or color toward either one. Lawyers for both sides are quoted directly, and their legal arguments are presented in an objective voice, without slant, distortion or detectable innuendo.
The article concludes with a humorous exchange between the lawyers and Chancellor Daryl Fansler (of course, the jury was not in the courtroom on Friday), and it ends with this quote from him:
"[O]ccasionally I am completely overcome by common sense."
I hope the same thing happens to the jury when they deliberate.