{"id":57363,"date":"2025-11-20T07:04:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T07:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/57363\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T07:04:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T07:04:11","slug":"federal-judge-who-melted-down-in-texas-redistricting-dissent-once-wrote-fake-majority-opinion-bashed-as-barbaric-fanfiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/57363\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal Judge Who Melted Down in Texas Redistricting Dissent Once Wrote Fake Majority Opinion Bashed as \u2018Barbaric Fanfiction\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

(L) Public domain photo; (R) Photo by Bobak Ha\u2019Eri<\/a> via Creative Commons license (CC-By-SA-3.0).<\/p>\n

A federal judge who issued a scathing dissent in a Texas redistricting case that attacked the majority for \u201coutrageous\u201d judicial conduct and \u201cjudicial activism\u201d is no stranger to dramatic judicial antics, including crafting a fake majority opinion for one of his dissents.<\/p>\n

Judge Jerry E. Smith<\/a> with the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is a 79-year-old Texas native who received both his undergraduate and law degrees from Yale University. He was nominated to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1987.<\/p>\n

Smith was the dissenting opinion in a 2-1 decision<\/a> issued on Tuesday in which the majority blocked Texas\u2019s efforts to redraw its congressional maps, finding that there was \u201csubstantial evidence\u201d the new district lines were \u201cracially gerrymandered,\u201d and ordering the state to return to its 2021 map.<\/p>\n

Normally, states draw their electoral maps every decade after new Census data is released, but in the wake of President Donald Trump\u2019s reelection and the critically important 2026 midterms, he urged GOP-majority states to redraw their district lines early in order to give Republicans an advantage.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0160-page opinion<\/a> was written by Judge Jeffrey V. Brown with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, a Trump appointee, and joined by Senior U.S. District Judge David C. Guaderrama, an Obama appointee. At the time the opinion was released on Tuesday, Smith\u2019s dissent was noted, but his dissenting opinion was not included.<\/p>\n

In the majority ruling, Brown found multiple reasons<\/a> that the plaintiffs were \u201clikely to prove at trial that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,\u201d specifically citing a letter from the Department of Justice and multiple public comments by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and ruled to grant a preliminary injunction ordering the state to revert to the 2021 maps.<\/p>\n

Brown\u2019s opinion also expressly rejected Texas\u2019s argument that going back to the 2021 map would cause a \u201csignificant disruption,\u201d pointing out that the filing deadline had not yet passed and the court ruling was issued \u201cwell before\u201d that Dec. 8 deadline.<\/p>\n

\u201cSimply put, the 2026 congressional election is not underway,\u201d wrote Brown, adding that any \u201cdisruption\u201d the state claimed \u201cis attributable to the Legislature, not the Court,\u201d and commented that the case had been\u00a0handled expeditiously, with the plaintiffs\u2019 lawsuit being swiftly filed and the court and parties having worked \u201cdiligently\u201d to get the motions filed and the preliminary injunction hearing scheduled, held, and a ruling issued \u2014 which had been a \u201cHerculean task,\u201d but the three-judge panel \u201chas done everything in its power to rule as quickly as possible\u201d and \u201csufficient time remains for an injunction to take effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s 104-page dissent begins by quoting an iconic Bette Davis film character (Margo Channing, \u201cFasten your seatbelts. It\u2019s going to be a bumpy night!\u201d from 1950\u2019s All About Eve<\/a>) then dives straight into an attack on Brown\u2019s character, accusing him of \u201cpernicious judicial misbehavior,\u201d the \u201cmost outrageous conduct by a judge that I have ever encountered in a case in which I have been involved,\u201d and \u201cthe most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chief among Smith\u2019s complaints is that Brown \u201cissued a 160-page opinion without giving me any reasonable opportunity to respond,\u201d writing that Brown and Guaderrama voted after the evidentiary hearing concluded on Oct. 10 to issue the preliminary injunction, sending him several outlines and draft opinions over the next few weeks but not the final version until a few minutes before it was published in the court docket, having informed him a few days prior that they \u201cdo not believe we can wait for a dissenting opinion before we rule\u201d due to the time pressures of the pending election cycle.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis outrage speaks for itself,\u201d Smith wrote, declaring that \u201c[a]ny pretense of judicial restraint, good faith, or trust by these two judges is gone,\u201d accusing the majority of being \u201cunfairly eager to issue the opinion sans my dissent,\u201d and complaining that publishing the majority opinion without waiting for his dissent meant that it was in \u201ca separate, non-consecutive docket entry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s dissent also attacks the majority for not agreeing with him that the Texas redistricting had a partisan political motive, shrugging off the multiple citations of the DOJ letter and public comments by Abbott and other Texas state officials regarding a racial intent and impact.<\/p>\n

There are also several pages near the beginning of the opinion of Smith attacking George Soros because his foundation donated funds to projects led by the plaintiffs\u2019 attorneys and one of the plaintiffs\u2019 expert witnesses. It should be noted that Soros is not accused of any crime or unethical activity here. This section is a long-winded screed about Soros funding causes he supports; many plaintiffs in political cases who find themselves going up against the state or federal government often turn to nonprofit organizations to underwrite the litigation expenses and provide legal counsel to give them a chance against the virtually unlimited resources of the government.<\/p>\n

For a dissent that complains loudly about \u201coutrageous\u201d judicial conduct and \u201cjudicial activism,\u201d it is perhaps hypocritical to devote so much text early in the opinion to attack a nonparty, presumably because Soros\u2019 name has become a bogeyman for the right wing. The dog whistle to the denizens of MAGA world is clear: Soros helped fund this litigation, and he\u2019s evil, so the plaintiffs and their lawyers are evil, and these judges are evil for ruling in their favor \u2014 and thus they should be your targets for the day\u2019s \u201cTwo Minutes Hate<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless, in the midst of this section, Smith includes a paragraph mockingly suggesting what he thinks Brown should have written:<\/p>\n

Judge Brown could have saved himself and the readers a lot of time and effort by merely stating the following:<\/p>\n

I just don\u2019t like what the Legislature did here. It was unnecessary, and it seems unfair to disadvantaged voters. I need to step in to make sure wiser heads prevail over the nakedly partisan and racially questionable actions of these zealous lawmakers. Just as I did to the lawmakers in Galveston County in Petteway, I\u2019m using my considerable clout as a federal district judge to put a stop to bad policy judgments. After all, I get paid to do what I think is right.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time Smith has indulged in penning fan-fiction for what he thinks other judges should have written.<\/p>\n

In October 2023, he dissented in a 2-1 decision<\/a> affirming a lower court\u2019s stay of execution for a Texas inmate named Jedidiah Murphy. The Supreme Court overturned the stay a few days later and the state administered the death penalty to Murphy by lethal injection.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe majority opinion is grave error,\u201d Smith wrote in his dissent, accusing his colleagues on the bench of \u201csuccumbing to a vapid last-minute attempt to stay an execution that should have occurred decades ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the interest of time, instead of penning a long dissent pointing to the panel majority\u2019s and district court\u2019s myriad mistakes, I attach the Fifth Circuit panel opinion that should have been issued,\u201d he continued. \u201cI respectfully dissent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith then goes into an 18-page fake majority opinion<\/a> as if he had written it for a unanimous court, stylized as if it were the real opinion, as shown in the screenshot below.<\/p>\n

\"fake<\/p>\n

fake majority opinion by Judge Jerry Smith<\/p>\n

\u201cI cannot stress enough how deranged this is: a life-tenured federal judge so incensed about what amounted to a 24-hour stay of execution that he decided to uncork a fake majority opinion to complain about it,\u201d wrote Balls & Strikes<\/a> editor-in-chief Jay Willis.<\/p>\n

This 18-page fake opinion was \u201cmore than three times longer than the actual majority opinion, and explains in painstaking detail on behalf of a nonexistent unanimous panel why Jedidiah Murphy should have been dead already,\u201d Willis continued, lambasting the charade as an \u201cexercise in barbaric fanfiction\u201d that was egregiously deceptive in that \u201ca casual reader would have no reason to treat the document as anything other than legitimate, and it feels like only a matter of time before some poor bastard working too late at night on a death penalty appeal accidentally cites it as such.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chris Geidner at Law Dork<\/a> shredded Smith for his \u201cfan-fic majority opinion\u201d in a scathing post cited by Willis, especially for how the judge had formatted it. \u201cWithin that attachment, there is nothing suggesting that it is fake, not law, not a judicial act,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not appropriate judicial behavior, and it\u2019s honestly very confusing,\u201d Geidner continued, describing some of the problems that could result from Smith\u2019s unusual dissent:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s now a document out there, formatted like an opinion of the Fifth Circuit, that is undoubtedly going to be incorrectly cited to and quoted from in the future. (More to come on this.) The \u201cwe\u201d language, in particular, given the inclusion of the other judges\u2019 names on the document, is arguably unprofessional. What\u2019s worse, this is in a death penalty case where a man\u2019s life is at stake. Smith inserting unnecessary confusion into the already tense, complex process surrounding executions is truly abhorrent behavior. (And, as others have noted, think what will happen when this gets pulled into legal databases, not to mention AI and ChatGPT systems.)<\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

The post Federal Judge Who Melted Down in Texas Redistricting Dissent Once Wrote Fake Majority Opinion Bashed as \u2018Barbaric Fanfiction\u2019<\/a> first appeared on Mediaite<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(L) Public domain photo; (R) Photo by Bobak Ha\u2019Eri via Creative Commons license (CC-By-SA-3.0). A federal judge who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57364,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[31042,10327,31040,31041,31043,30926,27,29,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-57363","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-dissents","9":"tag-george-soros","10":"tag-jerry-e-smith","11":"tag-judicial-activism","12":"tag-judicial-conduct","13":"tag-majority-opinion","14":"tag-texas","15":"tag-texas-headlines","16":"tag-texas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57363\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}