Dave Stafford of the Indiana Lawyer wrote a piece on Loretta Rush and how people around the State of Indiana where singing her praises. I wrote the following comment questioning why Loretta Rush gets a free pass on ignoring the protections normally guaranteed by the US Constitution:
"I find the media ignoring Rush's participation in Brewington v State to be repulsive. Loretta Rush sat on the Juvenile Justice Improvement committee with one of the victims of the case, while she was writing the opinion for the case. If this was a situation where a judge served on a board of directors of a bank with a victim or litigant in a criminal or civil trial, no one would find it proper for the judge to preside over the case; especially if the judge and the victim served on the board together for at least 6 years. This doesn't even take into account how Justice Rush claimed Brewington had a history of violence toward Judge Humphrey, her fellow committee member of 6+ years. There is no record or mention of violence in the trial record or at the appellate level; only in Rush's opinion. Looking at the situation objectively, how could an individual, with no criminal record, have a "history" of violence against a judge without any arrests or without anyone attempting to obtain a restraining order? If someone committed just one act of violence against a judge it would most likely be a federal case but Brewington was never arrest for violence because Dearborn County Sheriff Michael Kreinhop testified that no violence ever occurred. Worst of all Justice Rush wrote that a defendant may waive their rights to constitutional protections that prohibit unconstitutional prosecutions by inviting the error, by assuming any non-objection to the unconstitutional prosecution was trial strategy and not ineffective assistance of counsel. Rush went through the record of the case and picked out partial statements she believed to be threats and used them to support her written decision. On the surface this appears to be appropriate except if the Supreme Court is the finder of what is considered threatening then, by default, the defendant was deprived his 6th amendment right to know which of his actions brought forth the charges against him. The United States court system doesn’t allow a prosecutor to admit tens or hundreds of thousands of word into a court record so the high courts can establish the existence of any possible threats. If this were true, a prosecutor could indict Stephen King, admit all of his horror novels, and allow a higher court to pour through hundreds of thousands of pages in search of a few statements that the court deems to be threatening and then justify the “threatening” nature of the statements by claiming Stephen King was dangerous because he kept writing about horrific situations; all the while barring King from building a defense against the alleged threats because the threats were not defined until after trial. This is exactly what happened in Brewington; where even the appellate court did not establish Brewington’s statements were threats to safety but rather ruled Brewington’s statements, while possibly true, frightened the alleged “victims,” thus satisfying the Appellate Court’s bar for intimidating statements. This fails to take the common sense factor into account that Brewington was convicted of effectively terrorizing the alleged victims for as long as 3.5 years yet no one attempted to obtain a restraining order and Brewington was never held in contempt of court in his divorce proceedings. If Brewington’s threats were clear and worthy of prosecution then the threats were definitely grounds for seeking protective orders. As for the threat of arson, the word does not appear in the grand jury transcripts nor the trial record and Humphrey never expressed any fear nor did he mention that he believed Brewington’s statement about being a pyromaniac was directed toward Humphrey and his family. I have no idea why Loretta Rush receives a free pass on this but the citizens of Indiana should be wary of their constitutional rights before the gavel of the newly appointed Chief Justice, Loretta H. Rush."
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