Judge: County Official Can't Appeal Pa. Marriage Ruling

[William769]

A county official in Pennsylvania can’t appeal the decision striking down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

Schuylkill County register of wills Theresa Santai-Gaffney, whose office issues marriage licenses, sought to appeal U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III’s May 20 ruling invalidating the ban, after Gov. Tom Corbett declined to do so. She also asked Jones to stop same-sex marriages in Pennsylvania until the U.S. Supreme Court decided the issue.

Jones ruled that Santai-Gaffney does not have legal standing to appeal his decision, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. “If the highest elected official in the commonwealth chooses to abide by our decision, it defies credulity that we would permit a single citizen to stand in for him to perfect an appeal,” Jones wrote. Her action, he said, is “a contrived legal argument by a private citizen who seeks to accomplish what the chief executive of the commonwealth, in his wisdom, has declined to do.”

Santai-Gaffney also claimed that Jones’s ruling made her duties as an issuer of marriage licenses unclear. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he wrote.

http://www.advocate.com/politics/marriage-equality/2014/06/19/judge-county-official-cant-appeal-pa-marriage-ruling

[Swede Atlanta]

1. This is exactly what happened with the California Prop 8 decision in the Supreme Court......

The knuckleheads that were behind Prop 8 appealed a decision by the U.S. District court that held the Prop 8 driven amendment to the California constitution violated the U.S. Constitution to the 9th Circuit. The 9th Circuit affirmed the ruling of the District Court. The proponents of Proposition 8 appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The state of California declined to defend the case in either the 9th Circuit or Supreme Court. State AG, Jerry Brown, stated he felt the constitutional amendment violated the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court did not decide the case on the basis of the merits of whether the California amendment violated the U.S. Constitution but rather held that the proponents of proposition 8 lacked legal standing to appeal the District Court's ruling. Private citizens lacked standing to legally defend a state constitutional amendment. Only the state has the legal standing to do so.

That is the case here. The state prohibition of same-gender marriages is struck down as unconstitutional (as to the U.S. Constitution). The state declines to appeal/defend it. And this county official wants to step in, as the proponents of Prop 8, to appeal the District Court ruling.

If this county official asked for legal counsel in this case that attorney has committed malpractice because it is difficult to distinguish the California and Pennsylvania cases. Yes in PA they were only seeking a stay pending a Supreme Court decision rather than to overturn the District Court but the posture is the same.