Seventh Circuit Case of the Week: The Jude Saga Continues
For a resident of Milwaukee, there can be no question about the marquee Seventh Circuit case last week: the court decided the appeals of three of the defendants convicted in the notorious Frank Jude beating. In United States v. Bartlett, the court (per Chief Judge Easterbrook) affirmed the convictions of all three defendants and the sentences of two. However, the Seventh Circuit also vacated the sentence of Jon Bartlett, who will now have to be resentenced in the lower court.
As everyone living in the Milwaukee area knows, Bartlett and his codefendants were police officers convicted of civil rights violations for the savage beating suffered by Jude, a biracial man. For many, the Jude case, which received intense local media coverage, was emblematic of the state of police-community relations in inner-city Milwaukee.
Bartlett’s “win” on appeal resulted from a discrepancy in his sentencing.
This week, I wanted to respond to Jane Casper’s comment on Peter Heyne’s post 
One tricky situation faced by many academics is how to respond to criticism of their work that the scholar does not believe is accurate or justified. A lot of scholars, in my opinion, don’t do this very effectively. The less effective responses are those in which the author is clearly indignant or angry. A reader who is not intimately familiar with the details is, I think, moved to conclude that the amount of emotion correlates to the degree to which the criticism has met its mark. I’ve always thought that the more persuasive response is one of faint bemusement—faint, because if the tone is openly mocking, that risks the perception among readers that the target did not take the criticism seriously enough.