Her opinion was stunning. Not because it ruled against Willie Searcy and his mother, Susan Miles, but because of how it ruled against them. Owens ruled the case would have to be retried in Dallas because it was initially filed in the wrong venue. Yet venue was not among the issues, or "points of error," the court said it would consider two years earlier when it took up the case. "We felt like we got ambushed," said Ayres. A lawyer who had worked at the court at the time agreed: "If venue wasn't in the points of error, it is unusual that the court addressed it. If the justices decide they want the court to address something not in the points of error, they would ask for additional briefing. They send letters to the parties and ask for briefing." There had been no letters and no requests.

Willie Searcy's case was a textbook example of "results oriented" justice that is common in Texas. Often, judges first determine the desired outcome of a case. Then they adapt the facts and the law to make it happen. It was also a glaring example of judicial activism, or making law from the bench, which is anathema to conservative Republicans -- unless it serves their purposes, as it did in the Terri Schiavo case.

These rulings are not entirely informed by the justices' love for certain principles of law. If the Texas Supreme Court is the most business-friendly bench in the nation -- and it is -- it's because corporate interests pay for the justices' election campaigns. Of the $175,328 Owen took in from the Texas defense bar while Willie Searcy's case moved through the courts, she got $20,450 from Baker Botts, the mega-firm run by Bush family consigliere James A. Baker III. Baker Botts was part of Ford's defense team. It was business as usual in Texas, where the defense bar now pours so much money into Supreme Court races that justices would be left sitting in their chambers if they recused themselves from cases in which their big donors are involved.

So Priscilla Owen is the perfect Bush appointee to the appellate bench. If she's not particularly distinguished as a jurist -- and she's not -- she has demonstrated her willingness to creatively interpret the law in service to both the business community and the extreme Christian right.

Owen was creative to the point of deviousness in the Searcy case. Her delay could be explained (at least in part) by the long, detailed opinion she decided to write. Yet the content of that opinion was as stunning as her ruling on a venue issue that hadn't been briefed before the court. While Willie Searcy waited for the money that would provide him adequate healthcare, Owen and her clerks spent months laboring over a precedent-setting opinion for a statute that no longer existed. It had been replaced by the 1995 tort-reform bill Bush pushed through the Legislature.

Why would a justice write a precedent-setting opinion to clear up contradictions in a law that was no longer on the books? "Priscilla Owen poured [Willie Searcy] out," the former court clerk said in the argot of civil litigation. Even Owen's colleagues were remorseful. The day after the court's decision, the entire court issued a rare addendum to the opinion: "[T]hese appeals should have been concluded months ago, we unanimously agree that the parties' request [for an expedited decision] should have been granted." The court had voted 5-4 against Willie Searcy. But it unanimously agreed to apologize for the unconscionable delay.

Ayres began the case again, this time in Dallas. Ruling on a point of law that wasn't raised in the appeals and writing about a statute that no longer existed, Owen had put him there. Ford's second round of procedural appeals finally ran out on June 29, 2001, when the Dallas Court of Appeals handed down a ruling that seemed to guarantee Susan Miles the money she needed to care for her son. The boy -- who had (heroically) graduated from high school, wheeled from class to class by an attendant who monitored the ventilator that kept him breathing and held a transducer to his throat to allow him to "talk" -- was now 21 and living by a system his parents had patched together.

Four days later, on July 3, the patchwork system of care unraveled. Willie's night attendant left at 4 a.m. At 5 a.m. Susan Miles walked into her son's bedroom and immediately realized that something was wrong. The ventilator was not working. "Aged out" of Medicaid at 21, Willie's weekly nursing allotment had been reduced from 104 to 34 hours. His working-class parents didn't have the resources to hire round-the-clock attendants or place him in a facility where he would have round-the-clock monitoring and care. What Jack Ayres had described nine years earlier as "a race to save this kid's life" had become a marathon. But it was over.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing -- before Owen's appointment was blocked by Democrats the first time around -- Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked Owen why the decision took so long while Willie Searcy's life was in peril. Owen's answer was straightforward and, for the record, honest.

"He didn't pass away while his case was before my court," she said.

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