Wis Supreme Court Judge Accused of Choking Fellow Judge

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The woman judge is claiming that he 'put his hands around her neck in anger.' Curling your hands around someone's neck is not the same as blocking with your hands.

I had a woman literally run straight into me once in a Friday night capture-the-flag game (incidentally, I suspect that the reason more adults don't play games like this is that adults have a lot more mass and can injure themselves and others when stuff like this happens, more so than kids) - I put up my hands to stop her (I was guarding the flag) and she just ran into me. I guess she expected me to move... anyway, point being that my hands were at body-level, not neck-level. Even if they had been at neck level (which would have been a deliberate clothesline), they wouldn't have ended up curled around her neck. Even if Prosser did initially put up his hands to protect himself, it changed to something else when he grabbed her neck.

more importantly are they elected Judges or merit judges?

You are assuming that he's had self-defense training. He may also have been trying to grab her wrists to keep her from hitting him when she was in that frenzy and missed. He had nothing to worry about, he knew which was the court would likely rule, she on the other hand was in the dissent.

That is, unless Prosser isn't telling the truth, and did in fact reach out to choke the poor woman, like the lunatic I believe he is.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Huh? I think he choked her too.

Supreme Court judges in Wisconsin are elected to 10 year terms in what are suppose to be non-partisan elections. The last few elections particularly have been pretty nasty however. If one dies/resigns, the governor gets to appoint a replacement for, I believe, the remainder of the term.

And LKL, I understand your point fine. If Prosser choked her(as opposed to raising his hands in defense) then he crossed the line and should be held accountable. However, I don't think that excuses her actions either tho if she charged him and initiated the confrontation, she should be held accountable. There are differing accounts and I doubt we'll ever know what really happened. I find the whole event embarrassing. Decorum is completely dead in state politics here.

That would put an entirely different spin on things. It will be interesting to see what the witnesses say - it sounds like there were several to the incident.

Has anyone considered the possiblity that he may have grabbed her by her shoulders and not her neck?

At National Review, Christian Schneider has what seems to be the most comprehensive account so far of the incident in which liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Ann Bradley was allegedly choked by conservative Justice David Prosser, who was just returned to his seat in a bitterly contested election.

National Review is naturally going to be predisposed towards Prosser's side. Keeping that in mind, if the facts as reported are correct, three things are pretty clear:

1) Bradley started it by shaking her fist at Bradley and pushing herself nose-to-nose, conditions under which many people might have tried to push her away by putting their hands on her shoulders.

2) Prosser did not put any pressure on her neck, something Bradley herself seems to have admitted, though she says that this is only because another justice pulled her away.

3) Either the original story relied on people who had no first-hand knowledge of the incident, or the source of the story is Bradley herself, and (also liberal) Chief Justice Abrahamson; the conservative justices seem to be backing Prosser:

There were six justices present at the time of the incident, four of whom would be more likely to back Prosser's version of the story. That leaves Abrahamson and Bradley as the only two remaining justices present. One source present speculated the third source may have been Bradley's law clerk, who likely didn't actually see the confrontation but may have head Bradley shout "I was choked."

Liberals are probably going to be disposed to believe that Abrahamson and Bradley are pursuing a legitimate grievance against Prosser, a self-admitted hothead who called Abrahamson a "b***h" and threatened to destroy her, and that the conservative justices are covering up for their abusive colleague. Conservatives will be likely to take the view that Bradley is a vengeful self-dramatist who inflates petty conflicts into savage attacks for political purposes.

I personally am heavily influenced by the fact that Bradley apparently declined to press charges against Prosser, and instead chose to prosecute her grievance by leaking to a reporter--a leak that airbrushed out pertinent details like the fact that she was standing nose-to-nose with him and shaking her fist when he allegedly started choking her. This does not seem to me like the behavior of someone who is confident that the facts will bear her out; it seems, well, like the behavior of a vengeful self-dramatist who inflates petty conflicts into savage attacks for political purposes. It's not as if the sheriff is likely to whitewash things for Prosser; he supported Prosser's opponent in the last election.

I'm also not thrilled that the outlet that originally reported the story somehow failed to check with the three other conservative judges who, reading between the lines, are pretty clearly backing Prosser's account. It's not like it seems to have been very hard to get them to talk; the Journal Sentinel had the story of "Bradley's Charge" less than 24 hours later, and they now seem to be leaking far and wide. So why couldn't this outlet get any of them on the horn?

But it is early days yet; law enforcement is investigating, and there are probably many pertinent facts not contained in Schneider's story. Frankly, whatever way you look at it, someone has behaved in behavior so extraordinarily unbecoming a justice that I find it difficult to believe either way. Having known quite a few people who liked to exaggerate the things that were done to them, I find this marginally more plausible than that a Supreme Court justice started choking his colleague in front of four witnesses--but only marginally.

Whatever you believe, it's clear that the court dynamic has become unbelievably toxic. And I fear that this sort of thing is becoming more and more common in today's partisan environment.