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3d DCA Watch -- When Granny Gets Mad, Run for the Hills!

Hi folks, it's that time of the week, so let's dive right in and see what our merry band of appellate judges to the south are up to in this week's edition of 3d DCA Watch:

Weiss v. Courshon

Hooray! Judge Salter is back, he's sick of crappy pro se pleadings, and he's not afraid to say so in the utmost polite, classy and professional manner that stands in stark contrast to certain cranky more senior judges that shall remain nameless but which have last names that rhyme with "warts."

Specifically, in a longstanding estate battle that SSD's Alvin Davis has been handling since he put on his first bow tie several decades ago, Judge Salter removed the pro se appellant's case from the oral calendar, found her arguments to be frivolous, and affirmed the lower court's dismissal for lack of prosecution with this lovely send off:

Weiss?s intemperate briefs in this case, as in prior cases, urge us to believe her and not the record. She expects this Court to believe, for example, that the circuit court clerk?s office docketed a non-existent notice to show cause why the case should not be dismissed for failure to prosecute; that only the on-line docket, and not the notice itself, alerted her to correspond with the court (over a week before the hearing) and send a local attorney to review the court file for a docketed notice that was not in the file; that opposing counsel somehow tricked the trial judge?s judicial assistant and a court reporter on the morning of the scheduled hearing; that a highly-respected trial judge made an incorrect notation on the order of dismissal regarding a telephone call to a number that Weiss supplied; and that, given another decade or so, Weiss might ultimately come to Florida to prosecute her inflammatory complaint launched so many years ago. Suffice it to say that none of these suggestions is grounded in the record.

As Judge Winifred Sharp noted several years ago in another case involving a ?frequent applicant? to her court: ?This case reminds me of my grandmother?s final warning and admonition to me and my siblings as children, when we had exhausted her patience with our doings. ?Enough is enough,? she would say. And that was the end of it.?

I guess it was better to end that tender and heartwarming anecdote right there, because if I recall that opinion correctly here's what happened next:

"Then Granny would take out her jug of triple-x moonshine, make us get some switches from the cellar, and chase us around the cee-ment pond swigging her white lightning and smacking our behinds until she done nearly whacked our entire backsides back to Tennessee! Sooeee Granny, you're one ornery son of a gun!"

Full post as published by South Florida Lawyers on August 27, 2008 (boomark / email).