Thompson shouts even louder
He doesn't like the judge who booted him, surprisingly enough.
Anti-videogame activist and lawyer Jack Thompson has fired back at the County Circuit judge who removed him from an ongoing civil lawsuit brought against game companies and retailers and revoked his licence to practice law in Alabama, denouncing its authority to do so and generally railing against what he characterises as "utter judicial nonsense".
The case has been brought by the families of two police officers and a dispatcher killed in June 2003, who are holding Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar, Wal-mart and GameStop partly accountable for their deaths. Last week, presiding judge James Moore issued a document condemning Thompson, rejecting his previous attempt to remove himself from the case in the face of sustained attacks from defence lawyers, and withdrawing his licence to carry out legal work in Alabama.
Never one to shy away from a fight, Thompson responded this week by filing a document with the court, which he also supplied to GameSpot, in which he delivers a ferocious rebuttal of Judge Moore's actions. According to excerpts published by GameSpot, he denounces Moore's decision, blames the defence attorneys for "starting this food fight" and claims the court "presided over a wholly unethical and fraudulent assault" by the opposing counsel, Blank Rome.
These claims nestle around the kind of rhetoric that's typified Thompson's public persona. "Does the Court really want to take the position that the problem was Thompson's leaving the case rather than staying in the case? That would be interesting," he comments. "Did this Court somehow, in the last three weeks, manage to repeal the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution?" he asks at another point.
Contrasting the comments made about him in court by opposing counsel with his own, Thompson then asks: "Since when is it unethical to belligerently tell the truth but highly ethical to stylishly prevaricate?" It concludes: "Blank Rome started the food fight, and this Court ultimately took offence at the undersigned's efforts to shovel the effluent out of the Fayette County Courthouse."
Stay tuned for more on this, presumably...