INJUDICIOUS LANGUAGE (re: Sen. John Cornyn)

[maddezmom]

April 6, 2005, 9:18PM

INJUDICIOUS LANGUAGE
Sen. John Cornyn's comments linking violence against judges to their rulings are inaccurate and incendiary. He should repudiate them
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

It's hard to imagine any elected official, much less Sen. John Cornyn, a former Texas Supreme Court justice and state attorney general, making a speech on the Senate floor suggesting that recent incidents of violence directed against judges might be caused by jurists who make "political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public."

Although Cornyn did say such violence is unjustified, his statement implied that judges bring such harm on themselves by ruling improperly. According to Cornyn, "It causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions."

Cornyn's comments followed House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's recent warning that judges will "answer for their behavior" in declining to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case before her death. Such rhetoric creates a climate in which unstable individuals might think attacks on judges are deserved, if not actually condoned.

If officials made similar statements professing understanding for the motives of terrorists, they would be rightly denounced as unpatriotic. Yet individuals who threaten or seek to harm members of this country's independent judiciary are, like terrorists, striking at a fundamental principle of our democratic system.

~snip~
more:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/3122117