Bringing up the tasering obfuscates, not illuminates the question.

The issue is Sarah Palin's conduct. The ex-brother-in-law's conduct is a separate issue. I'll stipulate his character is bad. JM is right, the trooper's conduct is not the issue here.

Now what exactly did Sarah do to make the judge react the way he did?  

Court documents show that Judge Suddock was disturbed by the alleged attacks by Palin and her family members on Wooten's behavior and character.

As the divorce case dragged on, the judge's concern about family "disparagement" appeared to deepen. In an order signed Jan. 31, 2006, which granted Palin's sister and Wooten a final divorce decree, Judge Suddock continued to express concern about attacks by Palin's family on Wooten.

In monitoring how a joint-custody arrangement worked out, the judge said in his order that he would pay particular attention to problems noted by a "custody investigator," specifically "the disparagement of the father [Wooten] by the mother [Molly Hackett, Sarah Palin's sister] and her family members.

"It is the mother's [Hackett's] responsibility to set boundaries for her relatives and insure [sic] they respect them, and the disparagement by either parent, or their surrogates is emotional child abuse," Judge Suddock wrote. He added that: "If the court finds it is necessary due to disparagement in the Mat-Su Valley [the area north of Anchorage where Palin and her extended family live], for the children's best interests, it [the court] will not hesitate to order custody to the father and a move into Anchorage."

At the heart of the continuing "Troopergate" flap is evidence that despite Judge Suddock's warnings back in 2005 and 2006, Palin and her husband continued to make disparaging allegations against Wooten, even after she went to the statehouse.

The last quote is interesting because it appears that Palin had no qualms about violating the court order and risking her sister losing custody.  Its possible that the Palin thought the threat was empty because her ex was sooo bad. But that is no excuse for the behavior. I suspect, based upon her Palin's willingness to fire the librarian and the police chief for exercising their first amendment rights in supporting Palin's opponents, that Palin felt she could keep the judge in line.

TASING THE STEPSON

One day -- maybe a year or two before the investigation -- Wooten showed his stepson his Taser. He had just been to Taser instructor school. Wooten told Sgt. Wall that the boy was fascinated and pleaded to be tased.

"So we went in our living room and I had him get down on his knees so he wouldn't fall. And I taped the probes to him and turned the Taser on for like a second, turned it off. He thought that was the greatest thing in the world, wanted to do it again," Wooten told the investigator. The boy flinched but nothing more, he said. The boy was about 11 at the time.

In his interview with troopers, the stepson said it hurt for about a second, according to Wall's report. The boy said he wanted to be tased to show his cousin, Palin's daughter Bristol, that he wasn't a mama's boy. The probe left a welt on his arm, he said. His mother was upstairs yelling at them not to do it, the boy said.

As Bristol remembered it, the jolt knocked the boy backward, the trooper report says. She said she was afraid.

The probes are attached by thin wires to the Taser cartridge. In the field, an officer fires the probes into a suspect's skin or clothing and the suspect receives a jolt of electricity for five seconds, said Steve Tuttle, a spokesman for Taser International, which makes the devices. They are only incapacitated during that time. In demos, the probes might be taped to a person so that they don't accidentally strike an eye or injure the volunteer, he said. If the Taser is fired for just a second, it would feel like your funny bone was hit but the quick jolt wouldn't knock you over, Tuttle said.

Custody disputes can get very nasty, and it's not at all uncommon for bogus claims of child abandonment, child abuse, and sexual abuse to be made.

No fault divorce is a good thing, but it needs reform.

Instead of disputing over who is at fault, determining fault, and letting that help determine custody, what happens now is that the divorce is made, and the nasty fight occurs over custody issues.

And during that fight, all sorts of truly ugly and often wrong charges are made in attempts to get restraining orders, and set anchors in the judge's mind.

Many custody battles could be eliminated if we had a rebuttable presumption of joint, shared custody.

If we believe in women's equality and also men's equality, if we examine the strides in how employers and employees cooperate these days, and strides made largely by feminists, then there really is no legal reason not to have an assumption of joint shared custody.

There is lots of research to show that children are better off with shared custody arrangements, (see #21 and #25-27) and that a rebuttable presumption of shared custody would likely reduce the costs of divorce, the animosity engendered by the divorce, and the various ugly issues between the parents that affect the kids.

"The record clearly indicates a serious and concentrated pattern of unacceptable and at times, illegal activity occurring over a lengthy period, which establishes a course of conduct totally at odds with the ethics of our profession," Col. Julia Grimes, then head of Alaska State Troopers, wrote in March 1, 2006, letter suspending Wooten for 10 days. After the union protested it, the suspension was reduced to five days.

She warned that if he messed up again, he'd be fired.

"This discipline is meant to be a last chance to take corrective action," Grimes wrote. "You are hereby given notice that any further occurrences of these types of behaviors or incidents will not be tolerated and will result in your termination."

  I don't think of them as Godlike even in trying to be Solomons, and I realize you don't either, but your statement sounds as if you do, because you are coming across as seeming on only one side of this, in hopes we can get Pilan out.

It was meant to be ironic...responding in support of the previous posters use of the words "presumption of innocence" in which I do, indeed, believe strongly.

I have sat on four juries and I can tell you that, sadly, not everyone believes in it...or is even - behind closed doors - willing to follow the law and the instructions of the judge.  I had one juror removed from the jury pool for lying to the judge.  When questioned about his knowledge of the crime, he had denied knowing anything or even having heard of it...but in the jury room he gave an authoritative  speech about what he'd read in the local papers proving the accused was guilty, guilty, guilty.  The additional problem was that he had mixed up two different cases...two different defendents...and would not acknowledge his mistake or back down!

A retired Superintendent of Schools - only too anxious to 'give 'em a fair trial before we hang 'em.'

Divorce courts are concerned with preventing children from being subjected to disparaging comments about a parent. They are not in the best interests of a child.

Anyone can say what they want, but if they do it  in the presence of the children, or in a fashion sure to be relayed to the children, they are risking their chances of getting custody.

It is routine for a Judge to take into consideration in a custody dispute that a child, while in the custody of one parent, is subjected to disparaging remarks about the other parent.

It's in the best interest of the child to be in a home where respect is encouraged towards the other parent. It seems this wasn't happening in Palin's sister's house and he found Palin and other family members contributed to it.

My only significant experience with custody disputes is in the role of the res.  But my general sense is that disparaging remarks concerning the other parent are routinely taken into account.  I may have the constitutional right to call my ex-spouse a dirty word, but if I routinely do it in front of the child, the judge is going to hold that against me.  Similarly, it seems routine for the court to take into account the environment to which the child is exposed during custody or visitation - even if the acts of non-parties are thereby brought into the case.

I'm not saying your First Amendment argument is wrong.  It seems very interesting, actually.  But I'm not sure you're accurate to single out this judge as someone who clearly exceeded his powers; I think family courts across the country make this exact sort of ruling every day.  If there's case law out there rejecting the argument that taking disparagement into account is a violation of the First Amendment, of course you can argue that the case law was wrongly decided, but it's not particularly shocking for a court to follow the case law.

Nobody is writing stuff like - "wasn't Obama great on O'Reilly - or Olbermann - did you hear what he said when X asked him about this or that...?

So - the focus is on Palin. She has fire.

You may think she is the devil. Maybe she is. But she is coming across as someone who has some personal energy. Obama and Biden are increasingly comatose, timid and predictable.