Tuesday, September 16, 2003

Kool-aid, redux.

Oh, goody. Our favorite lunatic is back in the news. The mother who breast-fed her infant while tooling along the Ohio Turnpike without benefit of a driver's license or child restraints is appealing her conviction on the grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. Well, sure. That's because she represented herself, after rejecting her court-appointed attorney. (Why? Because he wanted to defend her using, you know, Ohio law, while she wanted him to use only the Bible.)

Better still: she's trying to appeal as an indigent, because all of her property passed to her husband when they married, and he's unwilling to fund her appeal. And yet, he claims to be the only person who can speak for her - she's not permitted to - and he gave his permission for her to pursue the appeal. So the husband takes the wife's property, presumably would take the wife's income if she were to work, and is the "sole voice" for the couple, and the taxpayer is supposed to pay for her appeal, specious as it is?

And best of all: this was a pre-emptive strike of an appeal. The judge has apparently not sentenced her yet, so it's difficult to see why (and what) they're appealing. But why should they start acting reasonably now?

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