A new complaint has been brought against Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman. I know I've shared this story once or twice before, but it bears repeating since it's personal and, at least to me, interesting. See, Gableman used to the the Ashland County District Attorney about ten years ago. His assistant at the time was none other than current House Rep. Sean Duffy (of MTV Real World Boston fame). I was active in the long term campaign to shut down the Navy's Project ELF facility at Clam Lake and we were always going to court in Ashland because that's the county where Project ELF was located. We had this real knob for a judge - Judge Robert Eaton - and he and Gableman had a practice of giving ELF protesters as much jail time, fines, and other hassles as they could, and it went on for years. The Navy paid the county about $5,000 a year to send sheriff's deputies out to their transmitter in the woods and bust us for trying to nonviolently shut the place down. I started writing to Gableman personally, telling him that Ashland would be better off just telling the Navy they weren't going to be on security detail anymore. It really wasn't worth their time and effort - the deputies all had to be paid overtime, jail time was expensive, and most people never paid their fines anyway. It was a waste of the taxpayers' time. Well, he actually relented, but not without sticking it to us a few more times - like the time several of us drove up to court one day just to find it empty and - surprise! - the charges we were facing were dropped. The in-person meetings that I had with Gableman were few and far between. I'm sure he was busy campaigning for a better gig in those days. But his view of us peace activists was that we were no-good, lazy hippies. He told me to my face once, 'Why don't you do something else with your time - like volunteer with Habitat for Humanity?' He just assumed out of nowhere that protesting is all we were doing with our time. How wrong he was! Antiwar protests soon swelled into the millions with the coming of the War in Iraq in 2003. Project ELF was shut down - the Navy finally (quietly) conceded that the Cold War relic and nuclear first-strike apparatus was useless in the post-9/11 world I guess. Gableman moved on to bigger and better things, landing a Supreme Court seat against incumbent Justice Louis Butler in a hotly contested and brutal election where he was found by 3 Supreme Court Justices to have committed election fraud for falsely claiming that Butler had released a sex offender by finding a loophole in the law. Fortunately for Gableman, there were 3 opposing Justices who were willing to back up his side of the story - the charges were dropped due to the 3-3 deadlock. Anyway, his past is catching up with him. The latest accusations against him are that he accepted free legal defense from a law firm that had active cases in front of the Supreme Court - a serious ethical violation constituting a conflict of interest. It'll be interesting to see what happens!
Link: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/another-ethics-complaint-filed-against-justice-gableman/article_813ec5dc-3b1b-11e1-ad6f-001871e3ce6c.html
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