We here at Legal Pad like jurists who are willing to admit their mistakes. So in our estimation, that makes John Gibson (the senior Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals judge, not the Fox News anchor), the shizzle.
After sitting by designation on a Ninth Circuit panel last fall, he authored an opinion in June upholding a cocaine conviction. The defendant, Kevin Freeman, asked the Ninth Circuit to rehear the case en banc. The court declined, but it did issue a new opinion (.pdf) in which Gibson reiterated his earlier stance but corrected a couple of errors. Most significantly, he wants everyone to know about the wiggity — and not the iggidy. In the first version of his opinion, Gibson quoted a Los Angeles detective who testified that “’iggidy’ refers to an ounce” and that “all gravy” means things are good.
Alas, the judge apparently got it wrong. In the correction filed today, he replaces the ‘iggidy’ sentence with “’wiggity’ signifies high quality cocaine,” and replaces “All gravy” with “gravy.”
What perplexes us, though, is that the iggidy — whatever it may be — pops up again in the opinion when Gibson writes about detective Bob Shin. “Several terms, such as ‘iggidy,’ “ticket,” and ‘all gravy’ were familiar to Shin before the investigation,” Gibson writes. “Other terms, such as ‘cuatro-cinco’ and ‘diamond’ were unfamiliar to Shin before the investigation, but Shin explained during his testimony how he arrived at his interpretations. Shin also offered interpretations of altered words such as ‘fezone’ and ‘teznower,’” both of which, sailed far above Legal Pad’s head.
— Justin Scheck
Comments