re: Priscilla Owen - Where's the "culture of life" folks on this one?

[tex-wyo-dem]

Oh, the hypocrisy of it all!

According to RWers, Dems are blocking her just because she is pro-life...in response, this story needs to be shoved in their face.

<snip>

Two years after the lawyers representing Willie Searcy and the lawyers representing Ford had requested an expedited hearing, Owen wrote the majority opinion. A process that could have been completed within months of the oral argument in November 1996 dragged on until Owen completed her opinion in March 1998.

Her opinion was stunning. Not because it ruled against Willie Searcy and his mother, Susan Miles, but because of how it ruled against them. Owens ruled the case would have to be retried in Dallas because it was initially filed in the wrong venue. Yet venue was not among the issues, or "points of error," the court said it would consider two years earlier when it took up the case. "We felt like we got ambushed," said Ayres. A lawyer who had worked at the court at the time agreed: "If venue wasn't in the points of error, it is unusual that the court addressed it. If the justices decide they want the court to address something not in the points of error, they would ask for additional briefing. They send letters to the parties and ask for briefing." There had been no letters and no requests.

<snip>

Ayres began the case again, this time in Dallas. Ruling on a point of law that wasn't raised in the appeals and writing about a statute that no longer existed, Owen had put him there. Ford's second round of procedural appeals finally ran out on June 29, 2001, when the Dallas Court of Appeals handed down a ruling that seemed to guarantee Susan Miles the money she needed to care for her son. The boy -- who had (heroically) graduated from high school, wheeled from class to class by an attendant who monitored the ventilator that kept him breathing and held a transducer to his throat to allow him to "talk" -- was now 21 and living by a system his parents had patched together.

Four days later, on July 3, the patchwork system of care unraveled. Willie's night attendant left at 4 a.m. At 5 a.m. Susan Miles walked into her son's bedroom and immediately realized that something was wrong. The ventilator was not working. "Aged out" of Medicaid at 21, Willie's weekly nursing allotment had been reduced from 104 to 34 hours. His working-class parents didn't have the resources to hire round-the-clock attendants or place him in a facility where he would have round-the-clock monitoring and care. What Jack Ayres had described nine years earlier as "a race to save this kid's life" had become a marathon. But it was over.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/051305B.shtml

[dogday]

1. Owens goes to 5th Circuit and it just happens that DeLay's appeal

would also end up at that court. I believe they want her for what is not being said, but what is being planned to protect Enron and others in Houston.