Posted on 07/01/2015 8:46:38 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
MADISON, Wis. – Kelly Rindfleisch’s roller-coaster ride to justice got rougher Tuesday.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman withdrew the motion he filed late last week asking the court to reconsider its denial of Rindfleisch’s Fourth Amendment appeal.
In a brief letter filed in the court Tuesday, Gableman said Rindlfleisch will nevertheless “have the benefit of review by the entire Court” because she has also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review her case.
Sources close to the case tell Wisconsin Watchdog that Gableman was concerned he would not have the votes to win reconsideration because Justice David Prosser would continue to recuse himself from the proceedings as long as Rindfleisch is represented by Milwaukee attorney Franklyn Gimbel.
As special prosecutor, Gimbel brought charges against Prosser in the wake of allegations that Prosser wrapped his hands around the neck of fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley “full circle skin-to skin” during a heated confrontation in June 2011. Prosser, who said he was trying to defend himself, was cleared of any wrongdoing. The incident became a national punchline for a dysfunctional state Supreme Court under the guidance of then-Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, the court’s leading liberal.
It is not clear whether Gableman’s motion to reconsider would require three votes or four. But it would certainly require four votes, or a court majority, to actually overturn Rindfleisch’s conviction.
Gableman, one of four conservative justices on the seven-member Supreme Court, couldn’t make his motion stick without Prosser, sources say.
Rindfleisch, a former aide to Gov. Scott Walker when Walker was Milwaukee County executive, has been serving a six-month sentence on a felony charge of misconduct in office since early April, not long after the state Supreme Court voted 6-0 not to take up her petition. Prosser did not participate in the decision.
Had Gableman’s motion been approved, Rindfleisch would have been freed from state custody. Her plea deal states that she is to remain free while any appeal in a Wisconsin court is ongoing, according to Rindfleisch’s attorneys.
“The (state) supreme court’s failure to address the dangerous precedent set by my case is frustrating and disappointing,” Rindfleisch said in a statement to Wisconsin Watchdog. “I thank Justice Gableman for attempting to right a wrong. Because my case is wrapped in politics, I fear I will never get justice.”
Rindfleisch is the political prize in Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm’s political John Doe investigation of former aides and allies of Walker. She was convicted in late 2012, and immediately appealed, asserting that prosecutors violated her Fourth Amendment rights through general warrant searches.
Chisholm, a Democrat, used wide-ranging warrants approved by the John Doe judge to go through tens of thousands of Rindfleisch’s professional and personal digital communications. She was not a target of the probe when investigators found that the aide, who was also working for the campaign of Republican lieutenant governor candidate Brett Davis, responded to campaign emails at her government job.
A state appeals court last year upheld the conviction on a 2-1 vote, with the dissenting judge concluding that the prosecutor’s search was overly broad and unconstitutional.
The majority opinion concluded that “Rindfleisch has failed to present any evidence at any time during these proceedings that tends to suggest that her Fourth Amendment rights were violated by the seizure authorized in these warrants,” the appeals court ruling states.
In his dissenting opinion, the late Judge Ralph Adam Fine wrote that the appeals court’s decision “eschews the Fourth Amendment’s command and permits the government to rummage through Kelly Rindfleisch’s digital files for evidence of her crime even though the search warrants sought evidence in those files of another’s crime by another person and lacked probable cause to believe that Rindfleisch’s digital files had any evidence of any crime that Rindfliesch might have committed.”
Gableman could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
In his letter Tuesday, Gableman said he based his motion on Fine’s dissent.
“However, (Rindfleisch’s) appeal is now pending before the United State Supreme Court where, among other things, she will have the benefit of review by the entire court,” the justice wrote. “I believe that is the better course of action at this time, and therefore withdraw my motion.”
But Gableman’s position on the potential for prosecutorial mischief is clear in a memo he wrote to the court earlier this week. Wisconsin Watchdog reviewed a copy of the memo before the court was scheduled to meet on Gableman’s motion Monday morning.
“The significance of this issue cannot be understated [Sic], and has grave implications for each and every citizen of the State of Wisconsin: Can the government seize all of your communications because it suspects that someone you know has committed a crime, and then look for evidence that you committed a crime simply because it has your communications?” Gableman wrote in the memo.
“It should be obvious that this situation is the modern-day equivalent of general warrants.”
Gableman in the memo wrote that the court “must reconsider” the Rindfleisch case because warrants issued in the John Doe investigation amount to a “fishing expedition in which law enforcement received every communication …(Rindfleisch) sent or received and then rummaged through this information to find a violation of any crime, even one not identified in the warrants.”
The central issue, Gableman writes, is contained in the opening page of a friend-of-the-court brief filed in January by the State Public Defender’s office that urged the court to review the Fourth Amendment case.
“This case marks another collision on ‘the increasingly busy intersection between Fourth Amendment privacy considerations and the constant advancement of electronic technology,’” Assistant State Public Defender Colleen Ball wrote. “The issue is how the breadth and particularity provisions of the Fourth Amendment and … the Wisconsin Constitution apply to a warrant to search the email of a person who is not suspected of a crime, when that email is stored on the server of an Internet Service Provider such as Google or Yahoo.”
The implications of the appeals court’s decision are frightening, Ball wrote.
“The State may now seize the innocent citizen’s entire email account, search it in secret, and, judging from what occurred (in the Kelly Reindfleisch case), retain all of the seized email for future perusal,” Ball asserted in the brief. “The implications of the court of appeals decision are alarming.”
WITHDRAWN: Kelly Rindfleisch’s roller-coaster ride to justice continued Tuesday when state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman withdrew his motion asking the court to reconsider Rindfleisch’s Fourth Amendment appeal. Gableman said Rindfleisch would be served better in her petition before the U.S. Supreme Court, with the opportunity for the whole court to review her case.
Update on the Rindfleisch case. Our Wis Supreme Court gets no badges of honor on this one.
FReep Mail me if you want on, or off, this Wisconsin interest ping list.
"She was sentenced to six months in jail and three years of probation."
"Rindfleisch is now appealing the conviction in the John Doe investigation, aruging that prosecutors violated her constitutional rights with their overly broad search warrants."
It sounds like she really committed a crime and pleaded guilty. The problem was that she never would have been caught if not for illegal searches in the hunt to get Walker.
Sounds to me like she got justice for the crime, but constitutional rights were violated in the process. I think the cure for that is not to pardon her, but to prosecute those that misused the system.
she is totally guilty- of doing this while republican
Democrats can do this all they want
If all government employees were convicted for conducting political activities in their government offices, the entire apparatus of government would grind to halt. That’s not a bad outcome, but what this woman did has to be the most frequently committed crime in the country.
To make your case the prosecutor is doing political activities. This whole John Doe investigation.
Certainly ironic isn't it. Sauce for both goose and the gander seems to be in order.
Interesting judiciary they have up there in Wisconsin when you have one justice trying to strangle another.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-filing-a-civil-rights-lawsuit-1435694608
Why I’m Filing a Civil-Rights Lawsuit
Cathy Archer
“After much soul-searching, I am filing a civil-rights lawsuit on Wednesday against Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm. I fear his retaliation, given what I know of his methods, but the Chisholm campaign against me that began at dawn on Sept. 14, 2011, requires a legal response to discourage the prosecutor’s continued abuse of his office......
......The governor’s reforms, commonly referred to as Act 10, prompted angry union protests. The reforms also enraged many politicians, including, as I would later find out, Mr. Chisholm and members of his staff. My ties to Gov. Walker and Act 10 made me a prime target for Mr. Chisholm’s campaign to intimidate anyone close to the governor.
In other words, I was targeted because of my politics—in plain violation of the First Amendment and federal civil-rights statutes.
Mr. Chisholm had campaigned for Gov. Walker’s Democratic opponent. According to the sworn testimony of Michael Lutz, a former Milwaukee police officer and lawyer who worked in the district attorney’s office in 2011, Mr. Chisholm allowed his deputies, as many as 70 of whom signed a petition to recall the governor, to post pro-union “blue fists” on their office walls and attend anti-Walker rallies during office hours. As Mr. Lutz testified, the Milwaukee County district attorney made it his “duty” to “stop Governor Walker” from succeeding with Act 10.
In the months following the raid, I was interrogated by the district attorney’s deputies numerous times on a variety of topics related to the governor’s tenure as Milwaukee county executive, but I was never charged with a crime. I faced seven grueling confrontations that seemed designed simply to intimidate and harass me into providing damaging information about Gov. Walker—though I had none.....”
That was an absolutely bogus charge. The “lady” flew at Prosser in a rage (in full view of the other members of the Court) and he raised his arms and hands to defend himself from her blows. Later she claimed that he tried to “strangle” her. If you knew Justice Prosser you’d just laugh. He’s a small, quiet man — the epitome of a Mr. Milquetoast. The only people supporting the “strangulation” charge were the moonbat making the charge and her good friend the crazy Chief Justice who has since been voted out of her position.
Another member of the court claimed that he really didn’t see what hahppened, and the rest of them said that there was no evidence that Justice Prosser attempted to do anything except defend himself.
Thus, no charges were brought; and the Court did not unseat Prosser.
Doesn’t matter if he wanted to throttle her or she wanted to throttle him, any Supreme Court where one justice attacks another gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘dysfunctional’.
I should add that when the “strangulation” incident happened, the 2 “ladies” and their leftist cohorts had put Justice Prosser through a brutal re-election campaign (which he won handily) even going so far as to claim that there was a voting irregularity (not proven) in Waukesha Co.
Poor Kelly! Now she gets to go before SCOTUS - and that hasn’t been going well for anyone these days.
DA Chisholm needs to hang!
The worst part of the whole scenario is that the crazy lady (Bradley) who claimed that she was strangled (and who started the whole fight) just got re-elected to another 10 year term. Although the crazy Chief Justice lost her position in a Constitutional Referendum approved overwhelmingly by the voters, she’s also still on the court for at least 6-8 more years.
Obviously there need to be some changes here.
Trust me, they have been an EMBARASSMENT for a very long time. BUT - we recently got rid of Judge Shirley Abrahamson as Chief, so there is SOME light at the end of the tunnel!
At least he should be put in the same cell block where Dahmer and Anderson met their sorry ends.
I could live with that. :)
Changing the ringmaster doesn't get rid of the clowns.
I see the potential for a new reality TV show: "Judicial Death Match - Black Robes Edition".
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