1) How do we (the legal team) feel the hearing went?
2) When will the judge make a decision?
As to the first question, after the hearing, those of us who attended the hearing in person met for lunch to detox and review. It was a unanimous feeling that the hearing went well for us for a few reasons. First and foremost is that, for the most part, the opposing attorneys pretty much just regurgitated what had already been said in their Motions to Dismiss. 90 percent of what was said had to do with the question of whether the AG can refuse service for his client. What we have not released and posted on the website yet is all the county Motions to Dismiss. The reason why is that if we are correct in our position on this issue, those filing were done without proper authority. And as such, they will get dismissed. With that said, you should know that within those county attorney filings, five county attorneys are in agreement with us in our position on this issue.
The judge was very attentive and we believe that he understands this point of law regarding service of process. For those that don’t know, service of process is just the means set forth to serve the opposing party with the Petition and summons.
We encourage everyone to read our “04 – Pet Motion to hold AG in Contempt”. [Embed link into that document]
As to the second question of when will the judge make a decision, it is impossible to say. We encourage patience. The judge just had two trials and now he has to address our case. And the issues that have come up in our case are extremely important legal questions of the highest magnitude. We believe that regardless of which way the judge rules, such will get appealed to the State Supreme Court and will become precedent setting.
After some discussion, we thought that it would be helpful to explain the legality of “Standard of Review”: First and foremost is that the universal legal doctrines at this stage of the proceedings are that the judge has to: 1) accept the statements and allegations in the Petition as true; and 2) Look at those facts and allegations in a light most favorably to the Petitioners.
With that said, we hope and encourage everyone to read the Petition, our Reply to the AG’s Motion to Dismiss, and our Memorandum in support of our Reply [Embed links to all those docs]. Understanding these three documents should show everyone why we are confident in our belief on the issue of “standing”.
On an organizational note, there is an issue that has come to our attention for which we would like to apologize: For good reason, many have gotten confused over the documentation that has been posted at the website. In short, documents were being sent to our webmaster without any guidance on file names and where they belong. It was not the fault of our webmaster (whom is quite skilled and certainly appreciated!), but assumptions and lack of communication on my part. It will take a day or two to get our documents organized properly. Moving forward, I am committed to being more attentive to assist her as we move forward.
Lastly, we thought that we would set forth a few more legal standards of review that will be important as we move forward:
For the government to act, it must follow and apply these seven legal points.
(1) individuals must pose a significant risk of spreading a dangerous, infectious disease.
(2) interventions must be likely to ameliorate risks.
(3) actions taken must be narrowly drawn to achieve the stated objective.
(4) the action taken must be specific to accomplish a specified outcome.
(5) the least-restrictive means necessary to achieve the stated objectives are required.
(6) use of coercion should be proportionate to the risk.
(7) decision/actions must be based on the best available scientific evidence. Health emergencies do not warrant coercion that is indiscriminate, overbroad, excessive, or without evidentiary support.