Joel Schumm The Mighty Pen vs. Fort Wayne Jury Pool Selection

This one is too funny. Kevin Leininger writes about an attorney who fought one of Allen County Courts and won. First, Joel Schumm rode into the big city small minded Fort Wayne and received a traffic ticket. Schumm probably thought a busted tail light would get him a warning. But Schumm got a ticket and not a warning. So what happened? Schumm paid the ticket but he appealed the ticket and asked for a jury trial!

Schumm was an attorney, but an attorney from Indianapolis. It makes sense that a tail light would have called for a warning by the police officer. Not because Schumm was an attorney but because the infraction was a tail light. So:

Schumm argued police department guidelines recommend a warning in such cases, and challenged the ticket in court. Last July, the jury took less than 30 minutes to decide he had broken the law, after which Judge Marcia Lansky imposed the fine.

But Schumm was not satisfied with the jury of his peers, and had earlier objective. This disagree would lay the foundation to appeal the decision by the trial court. What was Judge Lanksy thinking? Schumm is a legal writing professor at Indiana Law School in Indianapolis. Arguing a legal point is part of being an attorney and the job of a a legal writing professor.

Fort Wayne does not have a law school nor a peer of new law scholars. Schumm has access to hundreds of students to research and argue this legal disagreement. Hundreds. Legal writing requires you back up your assertions, and the Court of Appeal ruled in Schumm favor in backing up his assertions that the trial court had error, the judge, not the jury, but the judge.

This is where Kevin Leininger steps in with the local newspaper to pass out another memo for a raced white person not honoring the traditional way of doing things in Fort Wayne. Tradition does not have to follow the legal guidelines to prevent arbitrary dissemination of justice. And this is what Schumm wanted the good ole boys network in Fort Wayne to know, he was no longer living in a world of tradition. But in a world in which he taught legal rules, not skirting the law with discretionary application to just fill a quota:

Technical violation or not, it’s clear Schumm’s broken taillight earned him a ticket only because Grooms, by his own sworn admission, was on drunken-driving patrol at the time and was required to write at least one ticket an hour. Police Chief Rusty York said Grooms acted within his discretion when he ticketed Schumm, “but we don’t encourage officers to stop people for equipment violations, and would counsel officers” who do it often.

Kevin Leininger lets us know that Schumm decision to fight this little old ticket cost us the taxpayers. But Schumm's decision to fight this ticket highlights how laws are enforced in the City of Fort Wayne in an arbitrary manner. And even more importantly how the Allen County Court supports this discretionary behavior by law enforcement by not throwing out such cases.

But the target was a legal writing professor, a young educated raced white male. Someone the City of Fort Wayne is always talking about recruiting, retaining, but, this one argued that the police and courts of Allen county follow the law. Kevin Leininger suggest that Schumm is having his way with the Court of Appeal because:

[itseems Schumm – a young, white, presumably affluent professor and attorney – was unconstitutionally victimized by racial discrimination when prosecutors rejected the only black member of the jury pool.

This is not the first time, the Allen County Court did not follow the law for sitting a jury. These are practices which are not legal. Schumm only charged the court will an error.


Schumm ride into Fort Wayne with a broken taillight highlights not only a police officer issuing him a ticket went against the police department guidelines, as a police violating the law, and a court sworn to uphold the law failed to follow its own procdures. This is not a bizarre legal technicality, but legal procedures that attorneys and courts are too uphold. That's what they teach in law school not in journalism school, --opinions that have to be backed up with law not just facts.

Schumm is teaching the law to the police and the courts of Fort Wayne what he teaches in his classes to future lawyers. I think Schumm at least wants judges in which some of his students may stand before to at least understand the laws that he teaches his students.

Side Note: Douglas Foy did more harm to the taxpayers with forging signatures and stealing money and did not receive the same media attention showered on Schumm. Schumm only had a busted taillight.