That should be fun. The Judge pointed....
the Defense in that direction at the last hearing. Evan went for the gun, as the Judge said. The new attorney appears to have an understanding of where to take things.
THE COURT: Well, your efforts were
2 nothing short of heroic, under the
3 circumstances, but you still have the result
4 that you have.
5 Basically what you're asking me to do is
6 to re-litigate that decision and the one that
7 was made before.
8 And I'm not telling you that that's out of
9 the question, but to do it in the context of
10 the Motion for Sanctions, again, I know that
11 that wasn't your personal choice, but that's
12 most inappropriate.
13 Because the first thing that you would
14 normally do is to show that the change in the
15 injunction or that the initial entry of the
16 injunction was made in error and ask the Court
17 to set it aside or something. That hasn't
18 happened yet.
19 Instead, the guy will go -- instead of
20 pulling out the baseball bat, he goes straight
21 for the gun and says, let's hold them in
22 sanctions and declare them frauds and liars,
23 when it's entirely possible that they said
24 things that turned out to be wrong, they just
25 were mistakes that they misattributed somehow.
1 And that's really all the evidence so far
2 has shown, that there's not been any -- in
3 order to get sanctions, you have to have
4 evidence of deliberate, willful deception.
5 And you've got some evidence that then
6 that they -- most of the evidence comes from
7 them admitting it, that there is a difference
8 between the original attribution that they had
9 and what they have now, in having checked it
10 out in more detail, have attributed
11 differently.
12 And it might be possible that they did it
13 in some sinister way to try to deceive people,
14 but it's very rare that people do that because
15 they almost never get away with it, because
16 these proceedings never end, seemingly.
17 So what I'm going to tell you now is that,
18 had you brought a motion to set aside that
19 second part of the injunction, I'd be listening
20 very carefully to the case you've been putting
21 on and take it very seriously, and making them
22 put on a defense to that question. But that's
23 not the relief that you've asked for today.
24 You've asked for a relief that would
25 amount to punitive sanctions against them, and
1 some sort of declaration that they have done
2 something that deserved punishment. And I
3 can't make that determination on the evidence
4 that's been presented so far today. It's just
5 not enough to support that relief.
6 That doesn't mean that you can't still
7 ask, citing the same basic argument you've
8 made, to amend the injunction.
9 You're allowed to ask to amend or dissolve
10 an injunction at any time. And if you do that,
11 then I have to listen to all of the evidence
12 and the fact that it might be -- some of it
13 might be the same evidence, is not grounds for
14 excluding it. I'll listen to it.
15 But right now all I've heard is evidence
16 which, if this was a proceeding about altering
17 the injunction, would give rise to a serious
18 decision about altering the injunction, not one
19 that would give rise to just deciding all at
20 once that somebody is committing some sort of
21 punishable offense.
22 And if I didn't mention the connection
23 between the -- what your clients under -- you
24 know, what the lawsuit was against them all
25 about in the first place and the -- this
1 particular piece of decision-making on his
2 part, that is, accuse everybody of something.
3 It's way out of proportion to which you
4 have any possible evidence for at this point.
5 It doesn't support his overall case or it
6 doesn't support the case that the criticisms
7 that he's been making are reasoned criticisms,
8 rather than ones where he saw a little bit of
9 smoke and decided that there was a great
10 compurgation by filling in a lot of details on
11 his own.
12 So, you know, I'm going to deny the motion
13 because you asked for sanctions. But it's
14 without prejudice to any sort of request to
15 modify or dissolve the injunction that is
16 frankly, in retrospect -- you know, I know that
17 you never had the opportunity personally to
18 make that decision, but you can go tell your
19 client now that he doesn't have the opportunity
20 to make any different decision now.
21 That's the only remedy that's open to him
22 under these circumstances for the things that
23 you made reference to.
24 And like I said, you've got something to
25 work with. They've acknowledged that some of
1 the things that they said in that process were
2 not correctly attributed. But that doesn't
3 mean that everything they did was dishonest
4 somehow. All of us make mistakes. And
5 hopefully, when we find them, we own up to them
6 and reckon the consequences of them.
7 So if you want to reckon the consequences
8 of that mistake, we'll do that in the future.
9 We're not going to do it, because today your
10 client had filed papers asking for punitive
11 action, which we only take when the case is
12 really, really clear that somebody deliberately
13 did something wrong or they get like caught in
14 a lie and then there's this -- it's a lot more
15 fun when that happens, but it's very rare.
I don't think Judge Stephens is a fan of sanctions. Fudd and HuffPuff wanted the Defendant in jail for what they claimed were posts here. Turns out they were "alleged" private messages on Facebook that they never even verified.
But it was just a mistake, huh?
AI
