Today in Supreme Court History: August 21, 1798

8/21/1798: Justice James Wilson dies.

Justice James Wilson

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

Matter of Disbarment of Gottfried, 518 U.S. 1043 (decided August 21, 1996): The Court disbars Lawrence R. Gottfried, who had been convicted of removal and destruction of government records under 18 U.S.C. §2071. Working for the VA, he evaluated appeals of denials of benefits. He made his job easier by extracting and throwing out documents and then referring the files back because they were incomplete. Eventually this attracted suspicion and then investigation. “From February 9, 1994, to May 10, 1994, the Inspector General copied thirty-eight veterans’ appeals files before the cases were assigned to Gottfried. In thirty-two of the cases, Gottfried removed and destroyed medical records, service records and other documents, and, in each case, he recommended that the Board remand without deciding the merits of the appeal. Some of the missing documents were found among trash on the curb outside Gottfried’s home and in his garage.” (58 F.3d 648 (D.C. Cir. 1995).) (When I was a new lawyer, in the days before e-mail, with a more subversive sense of humor, I asked some older attorneys: “What if every time something came to you, you threw it out without looking at it? How long could you get away with that?” The general answer was: about six months. I never tested this theory -- though I later had a boss who seemed determined to explore the limits.) As for Gottfried, he was on the job for 23 years before the roof fell in.

[Dan Schiavetta]

today’s movie review: Silverlake Life: The View from Here, 1993

Filmmaker Tom Joslin’s long-time partner Mark Massi got the death sentence (“you’re HIV positive”) and he decided to film his final months. Then Joslin himself got AIDS and declined faster than Massi, so that Massi became the filmmaker. This film spares nothing in showing the agonizing progress of the disease in both and how they take care of each other. When Joslin dies on July 1, 1990, Massi wails out the song “You Are My Sunshine”. It was about the saddest moment I’ve ever seen on film. We cry along with him. Crushingly, Joslin’s death certificate lists him as “single”. The film ends with a clip of them years before, healthy and vital, dancing and kissing, then a humorous scene showing Massi clumsily mixing one of the new “cocktail” drugs. He himself died a few months later.

So many people were hateful during those horrible years, when thousands were dying slow, excruciating deaths, skin rotting off their bodies, while Howard Stern mocked them with homophobic slurs, Rush Limbaugh treated the disease as a punchline, Pat Robertson called it God’s judgment. As far as I know none ever apologized, though fortunately I haven’t seen such behavior for a long time now (that is, until the VC moved to “Reason” with its cesspool commenters). Others looked the other way. The long dying of the Andy Lippincott character was movingly portrayed in “Doonesbury” (1989 – 1990); some newspapers refused to carry those strips.

With the people closest to the tragedy, the lovers and the friends, passions became intense and urgent. They can be forgiven in their grief, but some wrong things were done. ACT UP, lionized now, only made things worse with their stunts, such as spraying blood during a service in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Catholic Church (which by the way did minister to AIDS victims) considers condom use a sin, folks. Like, for example, rape. What if AIDS was cured by raping the first female you saw on the street? Would ACT UP stage a “rape-in” on women passing by on Fifth Avenue? . . . We even had people opposing testing of newborns for HIV because if positive it would indicate the mother was a drug abuser. Thus denying the babies treatment. Or was treatment effective at that point? “Why should the mother know if her baby has HIV? What good would it do? The baby will die anyway!” That argument was actually being made. And the tendency to stay clear of people with AIDS was hardly proof of homophobia. AIDS was, uniquely, a horrible, incurable, fatal, and contagious disease. You can only get it via needles or unprotected sex? Tell that to Kimberly Bergalis, who got it from her dentist. In 1988, when my caseload was mostly mentally ill drug abusers, we were forced to attend a “training” where the facilitator refused to discuss these issues. As often happens, politics blinded people to the facts and even as to danger.

It was lucky (in a way) that the victims were mostly gay men. Gay people — and when we say that, we mean people who realize they’re gay (whether in the closet or not) — tend to be more affluent, because sexual self-awareness has always been easier for affluent people, and affluent people can more easily have their concerns attended to. Also gay men were overrepresented in the media and in the arts, so they had a ready megaphone.

Which brings me back to this film. Edited by another filmmaker afterwards, it is (as noted) a gut-wrenching piece of work. But it is possible for documentation of any tragedy to suck — as art. Scenes can go on too long, irrelevant trivia too much focused on, etc. In 1994, in response to a multimedia work by choreographer Bill T. Jones of friends who had and had not survived the epidemic, the New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce wrote a column called “Discussing the Undiscussable”, in which she said she was not going to review the work or even see it. Her reputation never recovered, but she had a point. To expect a critic to opine on “victim art” is a kind of emotional blackmail. As Croce put it, “how can one presume to criticize it?” Fortunately in 2023 AIDS is now treatable. We can look back on Silverlake Life as a document of the plague years. It happens to be good art, but that’s not important.

[not guilty]

Now you have opened the floodgates.

[Dan Schiavetta]

So far, I’m sure my post has been read, but no responses one way or the other.

[Michael P]

I, for one, am glad that modern medicine has created treatments that keep HIV at bay indefinitely, and also those that significantly reduce the chances of getting it in the first place (PReP). Perhaps we can agree on that.

[Dan Schiavetta]

yes

[Bob from Ohio]

No personal sex anecdote?

[Syd Henderson]

Probably nobody's wondering, but James Wilson was the first Supreme Court Justice to die, and he also died while he was serving.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Also while riding circuit to avoid creditors. He was in debtors prison for a while — while on the Court. He didn’t steal, just had bad luck in his investments. I know the feeling.

[F.D. Wolf]

If James Madison was the most important and influential delegate at the Constitutional Convention, James Wilson was second. He was the chief author of Article II, and his vision of the Presidency is essentially the one we got, though he favored a one-year term of office. (Many delegates opposed the idea of a strong, singular executive, preferring a committee, something closer to a parliamentary system, with Congress as the primary power.)

He may have been the smartest man at the Convention, an intellectual, sophisticated political theory, but, like many intellectuals, he was perhaps not as attuned to practical, as opposed to theoretical, matters. He was only 55 when he died. A fierce opponent of slavery, had he served another 20 years, I suspect he would have been a leading force on the Court, and American history may have developed very differently.

[Dan Schiavetta]

That happened on an episode of "Barney Miller", where a letter carrier hadn't delivered a letter in 7 years (he kept them in his overstuffed apartment). His nervous supervisor tells Barney, "Don't worry, Captain Miller, this will probably never happen again." "Probably??"

[The Angry Hippopotamus]

Newman also did it in an episode of Seinfeld when he didn't get his transfer to Hawaii; keeping his mailbags in a quarter of Jerry's storage unit (Kramer rented half the storage from Jerry and then rented half that space to Newman).