So the Cole v. Carson case is in progress, with Cole’s brief now due on April 1st.  And now there’s another one, Farrar v. Williams.

In Farrar the poor schmuck is the Petitioner, whereas in Cole the government is petitioning.  But Farrar is represented by Hogan & Lovells, one of those firms, you know, and that raises the profile quite a bit.

We can be conspiracy minded here at LoS.  If we were so inclined this morning, we would see the hand of organized law enforcement behind both of these cases, with the goal of further confusing the SCOTUS on the role of the specific intentions of government actors in committing a Mooney-type due process violation.

In Farrar, the contention is that the prosecutor obtained a conviction at trial with perjured testimony, but he didn’t know at the time that the testimony was perjured.

In the Cole appeal, with the second question the government Petitioner is attempting to recast the claim – that a police officer deliberately lied about an encounter and planted evidence to implicate the criminal defendant – as a question of the officer being “inaccurate”.

See the connection?

The reason organized law enforcement might be doing this is to push the SCOTUS further along the Manuel v. Joliet holding, to place deliberate framing and fabricating and perjuring by police and prosecutors into the 4th amendment box as opposed to due process.  The goal would be to create statute of limitations problems for section 1983 Plaintiffs, which simultaneously gives bad cops and their institutional defendant proxies the incentive to stonewall their victims until the statute has run.

Another goal is to merge deliberate lying and cheating with unintentional misrepresentation, which conflates Brady with Mooney and subjects Mooney to materiality and harmless error analysis.

Remember we complained that the lawyer representing Manuel normally represented police and municipalities?  We thought we had written about that in these pages, anyway, but can’t find anything now.

There’s a game afoot in the SCOTUS that it seems only we at LoS are aware of.  We’d like help, but it’s our own side that poses the biggest problem.

Ugh.