In Denying The Meadows Motion To Remove The Atlanta RICO Case To Federal Court The Judge Made Up The Law As He Went

And He Relied On Almost Nothing Offered By DA Fani Willis In Her Opposition To The Motion.

In reading through the Opinion denying the motion by former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for removal to federal court of the RICO case filed by Fulton County DA Fani Willis, the issue that jumped off the pages of the opinion at me was the number of times the Judge who wrote the order made claims about the law on the removal process that had no citation to authority.

Federal criminal law and procedure is very much a creature of precedent and established practice. This comes from two realities — replication promotes consistency and predictability, and there are thousands of cases across hundreds of courts that follow consistent and predicable rules and processes on a yearly basis. Those cases produce a huge volume of reported decisional authority that is the basis upon which future cases are to be governed when the same or similar issues arise in new cases.

That’s why federal court written opinions on substantive and procedural issues of law are normally packed with citations to prior cases where the same issues or questions were addressed and resolved. Not all cases are considered “controlling” legal authority — meaning the lower court judge is bound — but even when they are not controlling legal authority the case outcomes are deemed “persuasive” on the case in which the opinion is being issued.

Short aside to explain how this works — there is one Supreme Court, and thirteen “Circuit Courts of Appeal.” The Courts of Appeal are the First through Eleventh, the District of Columbia, and the Federal Circuit.

There are 94 “federal judicial districts” and each one has a federal “District Court.” Those Courts have numerous Judges depending on their size and location. The 94 District Courts each fall under one of the 11 numbered Circuit Courts — with the District Court for the District of Columbia being the only Court under the Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia. I’m going to ignore the Federal Circuit for now — as is true of most attorneys, I’m not sure what they do.

The decisions by the Circuit Court in each circuit are BINDING on the District Courts in that Circuit in the same way Supreme Court decisions are binding on all Circuit and District Courts. District Judges — the trial court judges in the federal system — cannon ignore binding decisions from the Circuit in which the District Court sits. Decisions from other Circuit Courts are only “persuasive” — not binding. The fastest route to reversal is to issue a decision that is contrary to “controlling precedent” in the Circuit.

The District Court in the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta is in the 11th Circuit. Thus, all decisions from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals are deemed “controlling precedent” and are binding on the Atlanta federal court.

Decisions from other District Courts — even District Courts in the same Circuit — are only persuasive and not binding. District Court decisions come from a single District Judge, and none have authority superior to the others. All District Judges are equal so each is free to disagree with decisions of the others and make judgements on their won. That is not true, however, with respect to controlling precedent handed down by Circuit Court Judges in their particular circuit.

When reading an Opinion like the one issued Friday in the Northern District of Georgia, references to cases decided by the 11th Circuit are the most significant as they represent cases where the Judge writing the opinion believes he is bound by that prior decision. References to cases decided in other Circuits or in district courts mean the Judge is persuaded that those cases were correctly decided, and he is relying on them for support in making his own decision.

When a Judge writes a declarative sentence about what a law or procedure is or is not, and does not attach a case citation in support, that Judge is simply telling you his opinion about what he views the law to be. Such pronouncements are the weakest in any opinion. They may be right — but the Appeals Court is free to disagree. It is harder for an appeals court to disagree with one of its own prior decisions.