Appeals court unappealing to 9/11 mastermind KSM's plea deal

On Friday, a panel of federal appeals court judges, in a 2-1 gut-punch ruling, obliterated a plea deal that would’ve let 9/11 mastermind and scumcrumpet Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators dodge the death penalty for guilty pleas. The agreement, hammered out over two grueling years, promised Mohammed and his crew life without parole, a cushy escape from the needle of eternity.

The military prosecution of Mohammed and his fellow plotters has been dragging on for over two decades, mired in endless preliminary hearings and defense lawyers screaming about evidence tainted by torture.

Back in July, the Biden administration’s Defense Department announced pretrial agreements with Mohammed and three other 9/11 orchestrators. But then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in a power move, spiked the deal just two days later, declaring himself the sole gatekeeper of such agreements. 

A military appeals court in December slapped back at Austin’s play, reinstating the plea deal to sidestep execution. But on Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit said, “Not so fast,” torching the agreement and backing Austin’s authority to kill it.

Judges Patricia Millett and Neomi Rao didn’t mince words: “In light of the clear and indisputable errors committed by the military judge, which implicate issues of immense national importance, we conclude that issuance of the writs is appropriate under these circumstances.” Boom. Done.But Judge Robert Wilkins wasn’t having it. He came out swinging in his dissent, calling the majority’s move to overturn a military judge “stunning.” His words cut deep: “Our deference should be at its zenith when military courts follow persuasive military precedent in the construction of military rules. I am befuddled.” Ouch.

Mohammed, the alleged brain behind the deadliest attack on American soil, when hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, still sits at the center of this legal storm. And it’s far from over.

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Trump-appointed federal judges will not take on Stanford students after "intellectual terrorism" ordeal

Well look what they've gone and done, those nasty anti-constitutional law students at Stanford Law School. Those cute munchkins verbally assaulted/harassed a federal judge who came to speak as a guest of the school and now some Trump-appointed circuit court judges refuse to hire law graduates from Stanford and who can blame them?

On Saturday, judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Fifth and Eleventh circuits, Judge James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, respectively, announced they would not hire future Stanford students to clerk for them, similar to what they did last year with Yale law,  according to the Washington Free Beacon.

"We’re not teaching the basic terms of our democracy," Judge Ho said at a banquet for the Texas Review of Law and Politics. "Our Nation’s law schools are failing this basic standard."

He continued, "I worry they’re making the world a worse place. It’s not a coincidence that the worst disruptions typically occur at the worst schools when it comes to one critically important metric: intellectual diversity on the faculty and in the administration."

Stanford, Yale and Harvard, and other First Amendment intolerant institutions wouldn't know intellectual diversity if it bit them on their mortarboards.

At Stanford, protests erupted on March 9th when Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals was invited to speak by the conservative Federalist Society. Students shouted at him and prevented him from delivering his planned talk, and thus his First Amendment rights.

The students reportedly called Duncan "scum," asked sexual questions and said, "We hope your daughters get raped."

There were no consequences for the students for which Judge Ho criticized the school. The defense given was that the students had the right to free speech. But lost in this self-serving explanation was the fact that free speech rights was denied to Judge Duncan.

"The problem is that these rules aren’t enforced. Students disrupt without consequence. Administrators tolerate or even encourage the chaos," Ho said. "Is it really that close of a call—whether it’s okay to call for someone to be raped? Do these future leaders really not have fair notice that they shouldn’t ridicule a judge’s sex life? I’m all for second chances. But I’m not a schmuck." 

Among the protesters' incredibly doltish complaints was how Duncan refused to use a transgender sex offender's preferred pronouns in a 2020 opinion. Yes, he failed to respect or neglect what a man with real or faked gender dysphoria wanted to be called. So rather than having an intelligent argument about this issue, the students yelled at him like spoiled scumcrumpets.

"So what do we do about it?" Judge Ho asked rhetorically. "Well, ask yourself this: What do elite law schools do when they conclude that institutions are failing them? Yale recently called for a boycott of the U.S. News and World Report. And numerous schools have followed suit. Well, imagine that every judge who says they’re opposed to discrimination at Yale and Stanford takes the same path. Imagine they decide that, until the discrimination stops, they will no longer hire from those schools in the future. How quickly do we think those schools would stop discriminating then?

"We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future," Judge Ho concluded.

Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne ultimately apologized to Judge Duncan "to acknowledge that his speech was disrupted in ways that undermined his ability to deliver the remarks he wanted to give to audience members who wanted to hear them, as a result of the failure to ensure that the university’s disruption policies were followed."

And it violates his free freaking speech, Marc!

The president of the Stanford Federalist Society, Tim Rosenberger, said, "A lot of us who worked very hard to get to Stanford are kind of feeling like suckers right now. But you get here, you experience this, you see that there’s a mob, there’s a way you’re expected to think."

"You might have thought the law school was to teach you how to debate with people, and how to make an argument. But in fact, it turns out it’s to teach you how to think a very particular way, to hold a certain set of beliefs. And if you don’t want to do that, then maybe these elite schools are not for you," he said.

In other words, it teaches you how to be an intellectual coward.

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