They have the nerve to meet in the John Minor Wisdom courthouse New Orleans. But today's judges of the historic Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals do not respect the intellectual legacy of the great judge of the post Brown v. Board of Education and civil rights era. Now at least one member - Judge James Ho - recently declared that he is so repelled by the liberalism of Yale law graduates that he will no longer consider them as candidates for post-graduate law clerks.
But it was a different era when the old Fifth Circuit was severed by a resentful conservative Congress in 1981. The New York Times then reported on its demise in a piece by Frances Frank Marcus:
Accompanied by an assortment of unjudicial sounds, the clicking of cameras, reminiscing, occasional laughter and a few tears, the 90-year-old United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, whose judges desegregated the Deep South, went out of existence here today.
In its place, after formal ceremonies and informal celebrations, a new, much-diminished Fifth Circuit Court began, a little more than half the size of the old court. The formal splitting of the 26-judge Fifth Circuit into two more manageable appellate courts will be completed tomorrow, with another ceremony opening the newly formed 11th Circuit in Atlanta.
Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth Circuit, the New Orleans legal scholar famous for his liberal decisions in civil rights cases, wrote that when ''Congress sliced a great court in two'' last Oct. 15, it was ''a day of mourning.''
Despite opposition from Judge Wisdom and others, the court has been split in all but name for some months, with 14 judges allocated for the new Fifth Circuit, which represents Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and the Canal Zone. There are 12 judges in the new 11th Circuit, which comprises Georgia, Alabama and Florida. 'An Administrative Necessity'
- GWC
The Trumpiest Court in America ...The Fifth Circuit
By Ian Millhiser
Trent Taylor says his cell, in a Texas psychiatric unit operated by the state’s prison system, was covered in human excrement. Feces smeared the window and streaked the ceiling. Someone had painted a shit swastika on the wall, alongside a smiley face. According to Taylor’s allegations in a federal lawsuit, there was such a thick layer of dried human dung on the floor of the cell that it made a crunching sound as he walked naked across the cell.
Taylor alleged that he was kept in this cell for four days, where he neither ate nor drank due to fears that the excrement, which was even packed inside the cell’s water faucet, would contaminate anything he consumed. Then, on the fifth day, he was moved to a bare, frigid cell with no toilet, water fountain, or bed. A clogged drain filled the new cell with choking ammonia films. With nowhere to relieve himself, Taylor held his urine for 24 hours before he could do so no longer. And then he had to sleep alone on the floor while covered in his own waste.
The Supreme Court eventually ruled 7–1 that Taylor’s lawsuit against the corrections officers who forced him to live in these conditions could move forward, and that lawsuit settled last February. But the Supreme Court had to intervene after an even more conservative court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, attempted to shut down these claims against the prison guards.
A unanimous panel of three Fifth Circuit judges held that it was unclear whether the Constitution prevents prisoners from being forced to remain in “extremely dirty cells for only six days” — although, in what counts as an act of mercy in the Fifth Circuit, the panel did concede that “prisoners couldn’t be housed in cells teeming with human waste for months on end.”
This decision, in Taylor v. Stevens, is hardly aberrant behavior by the Fifth Circuit, which oversees federal litigation arising out of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The Fifth Circuit’s Taylor decision stands out for its casual cruelty, but its disregard for law, precedent, logic, and basic human decency is ordinary behavior in this court.
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