Maybe Judge Shira Scheindlin should quit while she’s behind.
Ever since a three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stayed her decision on stop-and-frisk and removed her from the case, the judge has been beside herself. Apparently she’s under the delusion that the US Constitution gives her the right to preside over this case.
It’s made for a circus.
In addition to filings made by a New York University law professor acting on her behalf, we have all sorts of people weighing in. We were struck in particular by the brief filed by Michael Mukasey and Rudy Giuliani — at the request of the court — on the motions by Scheindlin and the original plaintiffs in the stop-and-frisk case to have her claims heard by the full appeals court. One by one, the former US attorney general and the former mayor picked apart these legal arguments.
On Wednesday, the court issued two rulings. One opinion simply explained in more detail its original ruling taking the case away from Scheindlin. The other rejected what the court characterized as the “unprecedented motion” to allow her to appear before the full court to ask it to reconsider.
In so deciding, the court emphasized it was neither addressing the merits of the case nor making any findings of actual bias by the judge. The rulings dealt with claims that the Second Circuit had acted, as one critic put it, with “procedural irregularity.” But the court’s discussion of what it did and why it did so ought to dispel any doubt about who is acting irregularly here.
As a newspaper that has followed Scheindlin throughout the stop-and-frisk trial, we believe she has more than once given New Yorkers good reason to question her impartiality. But by pursuing her “right” to hear this case as publicly and aggressively as she’s done, she’s now made stop-and-frisk — a highly charged issue for this city — all about her.
That’s a pity, because among the many injustices here is that cops who gave us America’s safest big city are now under the taint of racial profiling because of Scheindlin. We hope the Second Circuit’s decisions will bring us closer to what all New Yorkers should want with regard to stop-and-frisk: a fair hearing before an unquestionably honest court.