By the time Sonia Sotomayor had the chance to fuck him up, Jeffrey Deskovic had already spent ten years wrongly imprisoned.

The short story: Deskovic (via his lawyer, whose timeliness or lack thereof attaches to Deskovic under agency/principal vicarious liability) filed a Habeas Corpus Petition challenging his conviction (at age 16!!) for rape and murder.

Deskovic’s paperwork was filed four days after the expiration of the grace period that was provided for in the Bill Clinton Rolling to Re-election On The Dead Bodies of the Wrongly Executed Act.

Sotomayor granted, arguendo, the accuracy of this statement:

The Court Clerk, in an official act upon which Deskovic (via his lawyer) reasonably relied, told him in advance that his petition would be timely on the date he brought it in.

This act by its agent was not imputed by Sotomayor to the court, nor to the justice system, nor to the state which took and continued to take his freedom.

In this instance, the poor bastard had to spend an extra six years in prison—the “sucker penalty”—he believed the official agent of the court.

Now, I will admit that as a matter of principle I loathe and dispise prosecutors—they are venal, perjury suborning extortionists who make their living extracting guilty pleas from innocent people by use of terror—the unbearable risk of a long sentence imposed as a penalty for anyone actually demanding a jury trial and then losing.

And, of course, our plucky heroine was a prosecutor.

So, given I probably wouldn’t want to have a beer with her in any case, I still have to say that her ruling here is a Fucking OUTRAGE and I hope she is not confirmed. She is a mistake.