Frivolous Antifa restraining order, now owe legal fees

[SlugSlinger]

Good to see this type of response to these trouble makers (By Any Means Necessary). Yeah go ahead and cause trouble, just get your checkbook ready! Finally seeing some law and order with obama out of office. These people got use to causing havoc with no consequences, that's changing now!


Antifa member ordered to pay legal fees of Berkeley conservative over attempted restraining order
Frank Miles4 hours ago
Video
A middle school teacher and prominent member of an Antifa group has been ordered to pay legal fees for a failed attempt to get a permanent restraining order against the former president of the Berkeley College Republicans at the University of California, Berkeley, according to reports.

Alameda County Superior Court Commissioner Thomas Rasch ordered Yvette Felarca, the leader of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), an Antifa, or anti-fascist, group, to pay $10,000 in attorney’s fees and $1,100 in court fees, The Berkeleyside reported Friday. Rasch said that Felarca’s legal actions against Troy Worden, the former head of the Berkeley College Republicans, were not brought in good faith.

Felarca’s attorneys dispute that characterization, according to The Berkeleyside, and have vowed to appeal the ruling.

“By ruling that Yvette Felarca did not demonstrate good faith in filing the restraining order, the court recognized the frivolous nature of Felarca’s actions,” Mark Meuser, Worden’s attorney, said after the decision, according to The Berkeleyside. “The award of attorney fees should send a strong signal that she cannot abuse the court system to silence speech.”

Meuser testified in court that actual legal expenses were around $178,600, and that he was seeking a higher reimbursement, according to The Berkeleyside.


“This verdict was based on the judge’s decision to support the political views of Troy Worden and the alt-right and that is not acceptable,” Felarca’s attorney Shanta Driver said.

Felarca got a temporary restraining order against Worden in September after alleging he was stalking and harassing her on the Berkeley campus. Worden initially was ordered to stay 100 yards away from Felarca, but that distance later was reduced to 10 yards. Felarca, according to The Berkeleyside, then applied for a permanent restraining order in October but withdrew the order the day of the hearing, making Worden the prevailing party entitled to receive lawyer and court fees.

“Felarca filed a frivolous restraining order that restricted Worden’s First and Second Amendment rights and made it difficult for him to move around the campus to attend classes,” Meuser told Fox News in November.

Worden said he and many other UC Berkeley College Republicans faced months of harassment and violence.

“I have to look behind my shoulder whenever I am on campus and especially when I am engaged in political activism,” Worden said.

“The No. 1 public university in the world and the so-called ‘birthplace of the free speech movement’ is anything but. It is the place where America’s conservative youth are daily under threat of violence, lacking the support of the university administration, police, or city,” he added. “The Free Speech Movement is dead, and the left has killed it.”

 

[rc508pir]

That's BS, she should have to pay the entire $178,600

 

[dennishoddy]

No matter what is paid, the word is out there. If you continue, you will be financially responsible.

 

[tRidiot]

No matter what is paid, the word is out there. If you continue, you will be financially responsible.

Ninth Circuit, right?

She won't pay a dime... it'll get overturned on appeal.

 

[gerhard1]

Don't lose all hope. I hear that the ninth is he most overturned circuit in the land.

 

[SlugSlinger]

This is an example of one problem with the public school systems:

"A middle school teacher and prominent member of an Antifa group"

I can only imagine what's discussed in her classroom.

 

[Dave70968]

Don't lose all hope. I hear that the ninth is he most overturned circuit in the land.

You hear incorrectly.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfac...-circuit-isnt-most-overturned-court-country-/

--------
The 9th Circuit’s reversal rate is higher than average, but it’s not the absolute highest among the circuit courts. That distinction goes to the 6th Circuit, which serves Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, with an 87 percent average between 2010-15. The 9th Circuit is in third place.

1. 6th Circuit - 87 percent;
   
   
2. 11th Circuit - 85 percent;
   
   
3. 9th Circuit - 79 percent;
   
   
4. 3rd Circuit - 78 percent;
   
   
5. 2nd Circuit and Federal Circuit - 68 percent;
   
   
6. 8th Circuit - 67 percent;
   
   
7. 5th Circuit - 66 percent;
   
   
8. 7th Circuit - 48 percent;
   
   
9. DC Circuit - 45 percent;
   
   
10. 1st Circuit and 4th Circuit - 43 percent;
    
    
11. 10th Circuit - 42 percent.
    

We also found that the 9th Circuit never had the highest reversal rate in any individual term between 2004-15. (That’s the farthest back we could go.)
--------

Very important bit:
--------
The Supreme Court hears cases from the 50 state courts and 13 federal appeals courts, known as circuit courts. The cases that the Supreme Court chooses to take on are often disputed among the lower courts, complex, and problematic, so there’s a reasonable chance that the Supreme Court will decide that the lower court’s decision was wrong.
--------
That is, the Supreme Court self-selects its cases, and chooses the ones it believes were decided incorrectly.

Another important bit:
--------
The Supreme Court only hears a handful of cases from each circuit each year, so the rate of reversal is highly variable, said Jonah Gelbach, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a statistician. In 2014, for instance, the 2nd Circuit had a reversal rate of 100 percent, which sounds pretty bad until you find out that the Supreme Court only heard one case from the 2nd Circuit that entire season.

The 9th Circuit is by far the largest circuit. In the 12 months leading up to March, 31, 2015, just under 12,000 cases were filed in the 9th Circuit — more than 4,000 more than the next-largest circuit, the 5th Circuit. Despite that gigantic docket, the Supreme Court heard just 11 cases from the 9th Circuit in 2015, reversing eight.

This means the Supreme Court generally reverses far less than 1 percent of all the cases the 9th Circuit (and other circuits) decide.
--------

That last sentence is critical.

 

[JD8]

Call me naïve but I had no idea the percentages were that high amongst several Circuits.

 

[rc508pir]

Ninth Circuit, right?

She won't pay a dime... it'll get overturned on appeal.

That's exactly what I was thinking

 

[Dave70968]

Call me naïve but I had no idea the percentages were that high amongst several Circuits.

The important sentence was this one: This means the Supreme Court generally reverses far less than 1 percent of all the cases the 9th Circuit (and other circuits) decide.

The circuit percentages are that high of the cases SCOTUS chooses to hear. SCOTUS chooses to hear only a tiny, tiny fraction of the cases even petitioning for certiorari, let alone the total volume of the circuit. With its severely constrained resources (critically, the time available--there simply aren't enough hours in the year to hear all of the cases petitioning for cert), the Court chooses cases that it feels are most important--namely, those it thinks were decided wrongly, have a huge impact (in terms of number affected or principles affected), or have circuit splits (inconsistencies across circuits, in which case it's guaranteed that at least one circuit is going to see some reversal).

From http://www.uscourts.gov/about-feder...ational-outreach/activity-resources/supreme-1
--------
Parties who are not satisfied with the decision of a lower court must petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case. The primary means to petition the court for review is to ask it to grant a writ of certiorari. This is a request that the Supreme Court order a lower court to send up the record of the case for review. The Court usually is not under any obligation to hear these cases, and it usually only does so if the case could have national significance, might harmonize conflicting decisions in the federal Circuit courts, and/or could have precedential value. In fact, the Court accepts 100-150 of the more than 7,000 cases that it is asked to review each year. Typically, the Court hears cases that have been decided in either an appropriate U.S. Court of Appeals or the highest Court in a given state (if the state court decided a Constitutional issue).
--------

I don't know how old that page is; I've also heard claims of some 10,000 petitions to SCOTUS annually, which is still less than the total volume of the 9th Circuit alone. Doing the math, we're looking at about 1% - 1.5% of petitions to SCOTUS even being heard; even if all of them were from the 9th, and all were reversed, that would still leave a max of <1.5% of 9th Circuit cases being reversed.