Now Federal Appeals Panel says 'Stop and Frisk' Judge Did Not Engage in Misconduct [Lip Service does not stop white supremacy]

NYTimes

see Anon on white people who speak out against racism [HERE] 

A federal appeals panel in Manhattan that had abruptly removed Judge Shira A. Scheindlin from New York City’s high-profile stop-and-frisk litigation and questioned her conduct in the case issued a lengthy explanation on Wednesday, saying it had made “no findings of misconduct, actual bias or actual partiality” by the judge.

The three-judge panel’s Oct. 31 order has been the subject of pointed debate among judges, lawyers and others, and the statement on Wednesday appeared to be an effort to soften the tone of the original ruling, if not its import. The new opinion was another turn in the stop-and-frisk litigation, in which Judge Scheindlin issued a landmark decision in August imposing sweeping changes on the Police Department, including the appointment of a monitor.

That decision and the remedies the judge ordered were stayed by the panel’s Oct. 31 decision, and the new ruling, by the same panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, does not lift that stay. That means Judge Scheindlin’s rulings remain blocked unless, for example, the city’s appeal is withdrawn, a step Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has promised to take after he is sworn in on Jan. 1.

But in the opinion issued late Wednesday, the three-judge panel seemed eager to explain its terse Oct. 31 order, in which it bluntly declared that Judge Scheindlin “ran afoul” of the judicial code of conduct by appearing to steer the stop-and-frisk litigation to her docket in 2007 and by giving press interviews while the case was pending. The judge’s actions had compromised “the appearance of impartiality surrounding this litigation,” the panel had said.

The tone of the new opinion is completely different. It describes Judge Scheindlin as “a long-serving and distinguished jurist.” It notes that the earlier order had referred to the judicial code of conduct. “We now clarify that we did not intend to imply in our previous order that Judge Scheindlin engaged in misconduct,” the panel said.

The panel did not back away from its earlier conclusion that certain actions by the judge related to how the stop-and-frisk lawsuit ended up before her would lead “a reasonable observer” to “conclude that the appearance of impartiality had been compromised.” Those actions, combined with her press statements, the panel said, could lead such an observer to “question the impartiality of the judge.”

But the panel, made up of Judges John M. Walker Jr., José A. Cabranes and Barrington D. Parker Jr., reiterated, “We do not find that there was any judicial misconduct or violation of any ethical duty.”

Michael A. Cardozo, the corporation counsel and the city’s top lawyer, said in a statement Wednesday, “The Court’s ruling removing Judge Scheindlin from the case was correct.”

Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University who has sought to represent Judge Scheindlin before the appeals court, said of the new order: “Her reputation is vindicated. They spoke to her as a colleague and not as a disciplinarian.”

In a separate development, the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, is expected to release a report Thursday examining 150,000 arrests that the New York Police Department made that began as stop-and-frisk encounters between 2009 and 2012.

The report is one of the first to examine in detail how arrests connected with police stops fare in the courts. About 6 percent of such stops by the police result in an arrest, and of those cases, only about half ended with a person being found guilty in court, the report found.