† Is Kozinski The Victim Of A Vendetta?: U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts asked the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to handle the ethics investigation into 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski and his risqué private Web site, reports The Associated Press. Meanwhile, Kozinski’s wife of 30 years, Marcy Jane Tiffany, has rendered her verdict of the Los Angeles Times article that disclosed the existence of the Web site, as well as the paper’s main source for the story, Cyrus Sanai, in a 2,000-word statement published by the Patterico’s Pontifications blog:

[T]he LA Times story, authored by Scott Glover, is riddled with half-truths, gross mischaracterizations and outright lies. One significant mischaracterization is that Alex was maintaining some kind of “website” to which he posted pornographic material. …

The reporter describes the handful of comic-sexual items as follows: “the sexually explicit material on the site was extensive.” He then includes graphic descriptions that make the material sound like hard-core porn when, in fact, it is more accurately described as raunchy humor. …

One especially egregious misrepresentation is that there was a … “bestiality” video.  … [T]here is a version of this video on YouTube that apparently aired on the Fox channel. Crude and juvenile, for sure, but not by any stretch of the imagination is it bestiality. The fact is, Alex is not into porn - he is into funny - and sometimes funny has a sexual character. …

Cyrus Sanai, a disgruntled attorney/litigant, has widely claimed credit for engineering this smear campaign. …

Sanai wrote a vicious attack against the Ninth Circuit panel (Judges Leavy, Gould and Clifton) that ruled against his efforts to get the federal court to take jurisdiction over his parents’ ugly divorce case. …

Alex, who did not participate in the decision, wrote a public defense of the panel, and thus made himself a target. Sanai apparently made it his mission to retaliate against Alex. He managed to access our private computer and copy these files, which he then shopped around to reporters for months. Finally, he got the LA Times reporter to print the story that set off this firestorm. …

It is even more disturbing that Sanai, who is a member of the bar and an officer of the court, can get away with attacking judge after judge after judge.

On his blog, Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig explains how Sanai was able to access parts of Kozinski’s Web site that the family thought was private, and why he should be treated as a trespasser in the Kozinski’s home:

Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski's son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. …

Imagine the Kozinski's have a den in their house. …  And imagine the den has a window, with a lock. But imagine finally the lock is badly installed, so anyone with 30 seconds of jiggling could open the window, climb into the den, and see what the judge keeps in his house. Now imagine finally some disgruntled litigant jiggers the lock, climbs into the window, and starts going through the family's stuff. He finds some stuff that he knows the local puritans won't like. He takes it, and then starts shopping it around to newspapers and the like: “Hey look,” he says, “look at the sort of stuff the judge keeps in his house.”

Having been smeared as “the porn-collecting judge,” Kozinski could potentially face disciplinary action ranging from being barred from hearing cases for several months, receiving a public rebuke or being forced into early retirement.  

† We Fight Them Over There So We Don’t Have To Fight Them Over Here?: Part III (third item): Ahmed Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed, 26, agreed to plead guilty to a federal charge of providing material support to terrorists for a video he made showing how to turn remote-controlled devices into bomb detonators, reports The Washington Post. In exchange, prosecutors will dismiss other charges against Mohamed, who was arrested in SC with Youssef Samir Megahed, after deputies allegedly found explosives in the trunk of the rental car he was driving. The two Egyptian nationals were studying engineering at the University of South Florida on student visas. 

† Padilla Convicted On All Counts, But Was A Trial Necessary?: U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke ruled that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons is not violating the constitutional rights of Kifah Wael Jayyousi – one of convicted terrorist Jose Padilla's co-defendants - by housing him in a special corrections unit that restricts visitation, and screens calls and mail, reports The Associated Press. Jayyousi, Padilla and Adham Amin Hassoun, who were convicted of three terrorism-related charges, are appealing their convictions and sentences. Federal prosecutors, who wanted the trio put away for life, are also appealing on the grounds that the sentences were too lenient. 


† WA State Rule: Druggists Cannot Refuse To Fill Plan B Prescriptions (second item): The Washington Post reports on a new trend in pharmacies - “pro-life,” meaning that they will not sell the Plan B abortion pill and will not stock contraceptives of any kind. DMC Pharmacy on Route 50 in Chantilly, VA, “located in a typical shopping plaza featuring a Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John's and a Kmart … is one of a small but growing number of drugstores around the country that …  assert a ‘right of conscience’ to refuse to provide care or products that they find objectionable”:

"The United States was founded on the idea that people act on their conscience -- that they have a sense of right and wrong and do what they think is right and moral," said Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Society, a Chicago public-interest law firm that is defending a pharmacist who was fined and reprimanded for refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. …

[Some] pharmacists … believe … contraceptives promote promiscuity, divorce, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and other societal woes. The result has been confrontations that have left women traumatized and resulted in pharmacists being fired, fined or reprimanded.

In response, some pharmacists have stopped carrying the products or have opened pharmacies that do not stock any. …

Others also refuse to sell tobacco, rolling papers or pornography. …

“We may find ourselves with whole regions of the country where virtually every pharmacy follows these limiting, discriminatory policies and women are unable to access legal, physician-prescribed medications,” said R. Alta Charo, a University of Wisconsin lawyer and bioethicist. “We're talking about creating a separate universe of pharmacies that puts women at a disadvantage.”

While it’s true that in suburban and urban areas pro-life pharmacies are likely to be in the vicinity of competing full-service pharmacies, it is equally true that in rural areas a customer may need to drive for miles to find an alternative.

The Stiletto also disagrees with several dishonest or hypocritical business practices of pro-life pharmacies: Not posting signage to prevent a customer futilely asking for a product that isn’t stocked; not carrying standard birth control pills, which are also used to treat dysmenorrhea; and stocking Viagra, but not contraception (um, isn’t this counterproductive if you want to reduce the number of unwanted children who are killed by abortion?). 

As described by the WaPo, the point of a pro-life pharmacy seems as much to allow its operator to follow the dictates of his conscience as to put him in a position to be holier than thou – and making sure you know it. That’s not what Jesus would do.