Court Opinion

ID: 9474603
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:02:46.203146+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:12.370160
License: Public Domain

MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Bearing in mind that hard cases pose the risk of making bad law the present controversy constitutes a hard case. The behavior of which the defendants stand accused was execrable. In also reaching the conclusion Judge Hall has expressed, I nevertheless steadfastly hope that, if the allegations are supported by proof, stern retribution under the laws of Maryland will be meted out to the defendants.
Yet the law is grounded on facts, not on misperceptions of fact. For persons of the ilk which the defendants, at the present posture of the case, are revealed to be to have the power to confer jurisdiction on the federal courts would, in all probability, lead to very regrettable consequences.
I think not only of Jews and the regrettable indignities they may well have suffered here at the hands of the defendants. I cannot say that my sympathies for the first time go out to them only because those sympathies have already gone out to the Jews long ago and on many occasions as bad as or far worse than the instant one.
My ethnic origins are principally Hibernian. On March 17, for one group of Irish hotheads and on July 12 for another (as well as other dates during the year), violence deriving from misperceptions, of Catholics on the one hand, or of Protestants on the other, as an inferior human sort or race has broken out, to my everlasting regret from time to time. Yet it will but contribute to disruption of our nation to accord such ill mannered and unreasoned fracases the dignity of status as civil rights controversies. They belong in the state courts, where justice, more immediate and more personalized, is likely to be at hand.
Accordingly, I concur in the conclusion that 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981, 1982 and 1985(3) do not afford a basis for bringing suit in the circumstances here involved.