Court Opinion

ID: 9482973
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:06:56.103501+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:20.114676
License: Public Domain

ON PETITION FOR REHEARING
July 28, 1992.
PER CURIAM:
IT IS ORDERED that the petition for rehearing filed in the above entitled and numbered cause be and the same is hereby DENIED.
We are constrained to caution counsel for Spencer Gifts henceforth to exercise greater self-restraint in their briefs, motions, petitions, and other writings filed with this court. We admire and encourage vigorous advocacy; we deplore and discourage stridently perjorative rhetoric and unprofessional mischaracterizations of fact and law, particularly when such mischaracterization involves an order, judgment or opinion of this court. An apodictical example of the latter is found on the first page of counsels’ petition for rehearing: Twice the panel opinion’s affirmation of the district court’s evidentiary ruling is characterized as punishment. In one instance the word punishment, and in another instance the word punished, is set off by quotation marks, yet neither ostensibly-quoted word appears anywhere in this panel’s opinion! Neither is there even the slightest implication in either the district court’s or this panel’s opinions that they were rendered punitively. The same lack of professionalism that is demonstrated by the intemperateness of counsels’ petition for rehearing was demonstrated in counsels’ original brief to this court.
Moreover, let counsels’ client harbor no misconception that either the district court's evidentiary ruling or this panel’s affirmation of that ruling was in any way punitive; Spencer Gifts’ loss of this case cannot be laid at the feet of either court. This court, like most, assiduously avoids tarring the client with the brush intended for lawyers whose behavior we deem unprofessional.
But here we neither formally reprimand nor otherwise sanction counsel for Spencer Gifts. We do, however, seriously caution counsel against repeating such transgressions in the future.