Given that this is all water under the bridge now it might not be a good use of time to investigate more fully, but I’m still sort of curious. If I do end up doing the legwork I’ll try to report back at some point with what I find.

Admittedly, tho, intoxication as a defense to murder does seem more than a bit dodgy on the surface, but driveby glosses never actually capture nuance, and maybe, just maybe, nuance is what mattered here. Still unlikely, but the law’s a complicated beast.

“He claims he is proud of this case because it was the first time a jury had accepted voluntary intoxication as a total defense to murder.”

Free license to kill!! I’m innocent your honor…I was too drunk to realize that shooting him and then stabbing him to death was wrong!!! Yeah….right!

I have also found most people claiming to be lawyers who want to focus on “relevant legals texts and precedents” don’t really give a [insert your favorite explitve I'm not permitted to post here] about them either except as they can be used to undermine what most citizens regard as the proper application of the law.

The scariest thing I ever saw was on the Phil Donahue show back around the time of Ronald Reagan, although it may have been near the end of the Carter years. Some of you may remember all the news stories about a diplomat’s kid in Thailand. The kid was convicted of mass vandalizing of cars and sentenced to be caned in public, as specified by appropriate law in Thailand. Most of the newspapers over here were outraged. And on the Phil Donahue show, this man, who was so in fear of the rising crime at the time stood up and said ‘If what they are doing in Thailand is what it takes to make our streets safe, then we ought to start doing it.”

The incidents outlined by Erick above sketch the portrait of a lawyer who is more interested in getting people out of jail than in upholding the law, and only engage in a sort of legal jujitsu to make the outcome of the case be the exact opposite of the clear text of the law.

You are the one calling it into question. How about you do the research and tell the rest of us if the judge was on target or just demonstrating his “evolving” on what’s constitutional and what’s not.

Adding Labarga to the mix would pretty much disqualify Crist from ever being the GOP nominee for President, let alone anything else.

I dunno… how many deal-breakers did McCain have going for him?

And being proud of defending someone who killed on the grounds that he couldn’t help himself due to voluntary intoxication? There’s nothing conservative about that kind of mindset. Conservatism says that we are all responsible for our actions.

Yet not one word in Erick Erickson’s attack on Governor Crist discusses whether Judge LaBarga’s controversial decisions got the law right or wrong, based on the relevant legal texts and precedents. Or does Erick just assume that any decision favoring a criminal defendant is, by definition, wrong?