Sex Offender Gets New Hearing After Hearing Officer Rants Against Arial Font 312
ericgoldman writes "People often feel passionately about fonts, but government decisions shouldn't depend on what font people choose for their written submissions. In Massachusetts, a sex offender overturned the decision of a hearing officer after it was determined that (among other possible biases) the hearing officer posted to Facebook that he 'can't trust someone who drafts a letter in arial font!' and 'I might be biased. I think arial is inappropriate for most things.' This is just the latest example of how social media rants by government workers are causing problems for the workers — and the people they deal with."
Re:Priorities much? (Score:5, Informative)
Not surprisingly, the submitter grossly misrepresented what was said. In TFA, the Arial font thing was just a couple of lines in a much more troubling string of rants, stuff like:
- "it’s always awkward when I see one of my pervs in the parking lot after a hearing"
- he (the hearing examiner) “likes taking motions under advisement, but gets greater satisfaction denying them”
- On November 20, 2008, the day of the plaintiff’s hearing, the following comment was posted during working hours: “it’s always a mistake when people testify, because they get destroyed in cross examination”
- On that same day, the day of the plaintiff’s hearing, the hearing examiner also posted the following (apparently with reference to a different sex offender): he (the examiner) “hopes this guy doesn’t show up!!” which was followed up with “Tyson Lynch says yay!! He didn’t show up!”
...And so on. This is someone who is supposed to be fair and impartial, and the guy clearly has issues with the people he has a duty to work with.
So yeah, if I had a hearing before the guy that went south, I'd be trying to have it overturned also. I hope that the guy is fired and the people who did have hearings before him get new hearings.
Re:Huh (Score:4, Informative)
>You would prefer that defendants be defenseless?
What are you talking about? There is no legal system that would allow the defendant to overturn anything. That is the judge's job.
I was just making fun of the typo in the summary.
Re:Reminds me of Word Perfect (Score:2, Informative)
I recall when I was first confronted with the reason Word Perfect was still (at the time) preferred for legal documents and especially court documents. That formatting absolutely needed to look a certain way even if it was ugly and primitive looking. Word Perfect could do it, MS Word not so much. I thought it was ridiculous, but perhaps not as ridiculous as this story.
Honestly this is still an issue to some degree, although not so many people care anymore. It's not ugly formatting vs pretty formatting, though. It's WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). With WP, what you see onscreen is absolutely, definitely what you'll get when printed out on paper. With Word, there is a very small chance that the printed form will be ever-so-slightly different in a way that's legally significant (e.g. a word gets wrapped from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line). Page, line, and word numbers are very significant in certain legal contexts, and if it's not consistent, there's trouble. Also, I believe this is truly fixed now, but Word's word count feature at one point did not count the words in a document in the way that is proper for legal documents, and WordPerfect does. Thus for filings that have to be fewer than X words long, it was a critical distinction.
These days I suspect the usage of WP in legal areas is mostly just legacy carryover from the days when it was really required, but it was a real requirement with valid reasons, not so very long ago.
Re:stupid coments, but.... (Score:5, Informative)
I hope you're right that it was something he was required to write for the proceeding, because if he's trying to wing it without a lawyer he's already screwed up. Letters from litigants carry very little weight with most courts, even those (small claims/traffic court) that primarily deal with matters that aren't usually worth hiring a lawyer for. Litigants are expected to know how to draft a pleading and obey the rules of procedure.
Funny, but I thought citizens were guaranteed rights to a fair trial. If you have to hire a lawyer to get a fair trial then that means only those who can afford lawyers these rights.