On Friday, September 23, 2022, Judge Tucker dismissed my libel lawsuit.
The reasons she gave for ruling against me were… Oh, that’s right, she didn’t give me any reasons for dismissing my case. (The order she signed looked familiar, because it was a duplicate of the proposed order that Mitch had submitted to her a few days earlier.) Judge Tucker’s order said that she had considered Tommy’s TCPA Motion to Dismiss, and “after consideration of the pleadings and evidence presented, the Court finds that Motion should be and is hereby GRANTED.” And that was that.
From what I’ve read, Texas is unusual in this total lack of transparency.
In the case of summary judgments, most states (and the federal judicial system) don’t require judges to explain their rulings, but they do encourage it. On the other hand, Texas courts actively discourage judges from explaining their rulings in summary judgment decisions.
And in the case of anti-SLAPP decisions, judges in most states routinely explain their rulings. In Texas, however, judges almost never explain their TCPA decisions.
Note that this code of silence is not a result of any law passed by the Texas legislature. It’s not a result of any dictum promulgated by the Texas Supreme Court. Instead, it’s basically a result of long-standing precedent and tradition, which is a fancy legal way of saying: “We do it that way because that’s the way we’ve always done it, so that’s just the way it is.”
In my non-legal opinion, that policy sucks.
For one thing, how can litigants effectively appeal adverse decisions if they have no idea of the reasoning behind those decisions?
And how can litigants even be sure if judges familiarize themselves with their cases if judges issue decisions with no explanations? Does anyone really believe that there has never been a single case in which a judge issued a decision without knowing anything about the case? And if that’s ever happened, even once, how do I, as a litigant, know that it didn’t happen to me?
But even without those specifics, judicial decisions that lack explanations fly in the face of everything Americans believe about fairness and equity. In a very real sense, judges owe us explanations. We are real people, and we don’t deserve to be treated with such arbitrary indifference. We invest a stunning amount of power in judges – and if they’re going to issue rulings that have the potential for ruining our lives, they should be obligated to tell us why. Anything short of that is not an equitable judicial decision. It’s a state-sponsored edict.
So here are a few of the things that the Texas judicial system did to me in 2022:
- Judge Ray Wheless ruled against me without telling me why.
- Judge Andrea Bouressa recused herself without telling me why.
- Judge George Flint recused himself without telling me why.
- Judge Angela Tucker ruled against me without telling me why.
So it turns out that Texas justice is not only blind.
It’s also dumb.
§ § § § § § §
But it turned out that the most potentially damaging event that happened to me was not something that was left unsaid.
Remember when Attorney J. Mitchell Little told Judge Angela Tucker that she had to reach a decision by the end of the week?
THAT WAS NOT TRUE.
Document Links
Order granting TCPA motion to dismiss
Proposed order granting TCPA motion to dismiss
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