I have pointed this out in past, and now have a prime example to point to in the following report of a Supreme Court Decision. The first report is from Hot Air a generally conservative blog. The article is written by Jazz Shaw who usually breaks conservative. I see no indication that Jazz Shaw is an attorney. The second report comes from Legal Insurrection a law blog with Libertarian/Conservative leanings. The article is written by Andrew Branca. He still lives in Massachusetts, which makes him a Masshole. He is an attorney specializing in self-defense issues and Second Amendment issues. He has written numerous, books, articles and seminars on the subject.

My stance is not to trust MSM reports regarding Supreme Court decisions. If you have never seen a decision they can be several pages to several hundred. In it, the justices provide a description of the controversy, the status of the law as it exists, legal precedents that indicate that the law ought to be changed in the manner they support. Opposing Justices can have their say and in the end, it comes down to the vote count.

There is gamesmanship involved, in that the winning side gets to write the “majority” opinion. This is important because majority opinion can be very narrowly focused or very broadly based. For example and this is probably a very poor example, the Supreme Court in Griswald (Connecticut birth control case) ruled that the government had no compelling interest monitoring the sexual activities of a married couple. This created the right to privacy which the Court used in Roe V Wade (abortion). What would have happened if the Court in Griswald ruled that the government monitoring activities interfered with Interstate commerce, the right to sell a legal product across state lines. With no right to privacy, how would the court resolve Roe V Wade. The ability to assign or write the majority opinion sometimes explains the strange bounces that the court makes.

In reading these two articles you would almost think that they were discussing two different decisions. Nope, just one.

Scotus-may-gone-far-granting-police-immunity

Supreme-court-reverses-9th-circuit-rules-for-officer-in-police-excessive-use-of-force-case