Posted by The suit to nullify the re-election of Sen. Larry Means (D – Attalla) to SD 10 has been consolidated with the suit to disqualify the election of Democratic Senators Lowell Barron, Zeb Little, Hank Sanders, and Roger Bedford. As I mentioned before, the circumstances surrounding the two cases, while similar, are not the same.
Two lawyers (one of them who has worked election cases) I’ve spoken with tell me that consolidation does not necessarily mean that the two cases will have identical outcomes. One likened it to a criminal trial with multiple defendants: though there is one trial, there may be different laws and different pieces of evidence that apply to the various defendants, and they may receive different verdicts.
Consolidation allows for “conservation of judicial resources” and “guards against inconsistent outcomes.” What you don’t want, one lawyer told me, “is different outcomes from different judges where you can’t tell what laws were in play or how they were applied.” The point as I understand it is that, even if the outcomes are different, they result from consistent application of the law. (I welcome readers who know more about this to weigh in with more – either in comments or directly to me.)
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yeah, that’s pretty much all it means. these are all individual cases, but the applicable law is the same, and most of the facts are the same, so you try them all at one time in order to save resources and prevent inconsistent outcomes.