Yes.... Judges are Affected by Public Perception (Part 2)

Here's another example of the extent to which Judges are affected by public pressure. According to Adam Liptak of The New York Times, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit recently reversed itself on a highly controversial decision it made last year when it decided that there were no racial overtones when a a white manager at a Tyson chicken plant in Gadsden, Ala., called adult black men working there “boy.”

Why? It appears the judges did an about face in reaction to public outcry over the decision, and subsequent brief filed by some of the top names in civil right history. According to Liptak: 

The decision prompted Mr. Clemon and 10 other civil rights leaders to file a brief. Among the signatories were giants of the civil rights movement like the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who survived beatings and bombings in Alabama and who died in October, and Andrew Young, a former mayor of Atlanta and ambassador to the United Nations.

The brief urged the court to reconsider, making the case that “boy” retains its venom. For evidence, the brief drew on personal experiences, history, literary classics like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Native Son,” and the writings of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Boy,” the brief said, is either a proxy for or “at the very least a close cousin” of the most charged racial epithet.

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Stephen B. Bright, the president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, was less magnanimous than Mr. Clemon. He said the case demonstrated “how judges manipulate facts and law to make a case come out the way they want it to.”  

“The new opinion flatly contradicts the first one in several places,” Mr. Bright said.  

The new decision followed unflattering news coverage of the earlier one and might have been prompted by the possibility of a rebuke from the full 11th Circuit.

Again, like my prior post on former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (from an interview I gave to The Wall Street Journal), this points to the fact that judges are not sitting in ivory towers shut off the world around them. Extrajudicial forces can have an enormous impact on the law and on justices -- and lawyers and parties that understand this will ultimately be more successful in reaching their legal, business and personal goals.