Shortest decision ever! here it is in full:
Third District Court of Appeal
State of Florida, January Term, A.D. 2007Opinion filed February 28, 2007.
Not final until disposition of timely filed motion for rehearing.________________
No. 3D06-2000
Lower Tribunal No. 99-20601
________________Albert Russell Francis,
Petitioner,vs.
The State of Florida,
Respondent.An case of Original Jurisdiction – Ineffective Assistance of Appellate
Counsel.Albert Russell Francis, in proper person.
Bill McCollum, Attorney General, and Angel L. Fleming, Assistant
Attorney General, for respondent.Before RAMIREZ, ROTHENBERG, and LAGOA, JJ.
PER CURIAM.
Deny.
Indirectly via the Minor Wisdom blog.
Still they do say that brevity is the soul wit..
Ruthie wishes that more barristers would remember this, on occasion one would think they are being paid per word…
Liadnan did mention yesterday that the BCCI case took 6 months to open. Sure its a complicated case, but isn’t the whole point to make it simple for the jury to understand?
Genesis manages to describe the creation of the entire universe in a couple of paragraphs.. The Almighty clearly wasn’t on graduated fees..
I seem to recall Jonathan Goldberg QC saying (recalling someone saying?) that there isn’t a case that can’t be opened in 5 minutes.
I’ve opened cases in 5 minutes.
I think it was Thyssen that took six months to be opened for the plaintiff: Crystall then allegedly asked for leave to amend. That was offshore though.
In BCCI Pollock took 79 days to open, Stadlen, for the Bank, then took 119 days replying. God alone knows what they were chuntering about all that time. I think the longest it’s ever taken me to open is an hour, and that was highly unusual.
I’m a great fan of short judgments. Looking at (1866) 2 Eq. (because I happen to be using that volume at the moment so it’s convenient) Romilly and the Vice-Chancellors frequently managed to deal with cases in less than a page of judgment, which makes it a damn sight easier to work out what the point actually was. (Bah. My trousers are now covered in rotting leather dust)
PS re the BCCI case, Tomlinson J got his own back on Pollock in the end. See the marvellous spanking of Pollock and Lovells at http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/Comm/2006/816.html particularly para 135. Not that the judgment (on indemnity costs) itself fulfils any requirement of brevity.