Jackson Jambalaya

Sloppy, bungled, carelessly, falsehoods, fabrications, shoddy.  Such are the words the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals used to describe the work of U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate Thursday as it removed him from a case. 

This particular tale of judicial incompetence began last year when the Mississippi legislature passed HB #1193.  The bill bars public schools and universities from spending money on DEI programs.  Schools can't mandate DEI programs or diversity trainings nor can they punish students for their views on DEI.  

Teachers' groups, unions, and several individuals sued the state of Mississippi and state officials to block implementation of the law on June 9, 2025 in U.S. District Court.* The case was assigned to Judge Wingate.  

The plaintiffs petitioned Judge Wingate to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking enactment of the law on July 18, claiming it violated the 14th Amendment and was unconstitutionally vague. Judge Wingate granted the TRO on July 20. This is where the fun begins.  

The TRO contained factual assertions found nowhere in the record.  The hallucinations mentioned plaintiffs and defendants absent in the complaint, declarations from non-existent people, false quotations of the bill, and erroneous claims the law already led to the demise of what were fictitious DEI programs. 

The Attorney General submitted a motion to clarify the TRO two days later. Caught red-handed, Judge Wingate replaced the "bungled" TRO with a back-dated TRO without explanation and issued a preliminary injunction as well. The Attorney General asked the Court to restore the original TRO to the docket but Judge Wingate denied the motion, calling the hallucinations "clerical" errors.  

Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley arose from the grave to accuse Judge Wingate of using AI to draft the TRO in October. Earlier post. Chastised but hardly chastened, Judge Wingate admitted the errors but blamed his clerks for the fraudulent use of AI.  He defended the removal of the original TRO from the docket, claiming he did so to "avoid confusion."  Uh-huh.  Both TRO's are absent from the docket.  

TRO? What TRO?

The defendants appealed to the Fifth Circuit for relief.   

The case went downhill for Judge Wingate once it reached New Orleans.  

The Court discovered the "corrected" TRO was not corrected as it included more hallucinations and citations to cases that did not exist.  The hallucinations did not include just phony cases but the names of eleven plaintiffs and two defendants that did not exist.  You can't make this up.  

A fed Fifth Circuit blistered the Reagan appointee Thursday: 

 * The proceedings in the district court were a botch job, to say the least.

* Judge Wingate “carelessly exercised his article III power by issuing sloppy edicts based on falsehoods and fabrications."

* Judge Wingate “dug in his heels,” claiming the hallucinations had no bearing on his order.

* Moreover, the district court got the law wrong. The TRO and preliminary injunction order rested on impoverished legal analysis that barely paid lip-service to the precedents of the Supreme Court or this court, seeming at times purposely to misconstrue the law by manipulating the words of statutes and cases, without regard to their texts’ meaning as a whole. The district court—or perhaps, being charitable, its AI agent—ignored and manipulated governing law, apparently to satisfy a policy agenda.

* It is even worse for the court merely to take the plaintiffs’ claims as true, with barely a glance at the arguments of the defendants. That is legal analysis so poor that it hardly deserves the label. The order defends its analysis by claiming that the plaintiffs “do not seek to challenge HB 1193’s prohibitions on unlawful discrimination,” ignoring the fact that several of the challenged portions arguably do nothing more than prohibit unlawful discrimination.

* The Fifth Circuit said the case "easily calls for reassignment" as public esteem for the judiciary is diminished by sending the case back to the same judge. 

* An objective observer would question the impartiality of the proceedings.  Indeed, the temptation would be too great, the Court held, for Judge Wingate to double down and try to justify the TRO instead of conducting a proper legal analysis. 

* In fact, given that the preliminary injunction order “generally incorporates by reference its discussion and analysis in its TRO,” the hallucinated case discussed above isarguably part of the shoddy reasoning of the preliminary injunction, too