ACLU: Afraid to say he’s gay, Larry Craig took wrong case to court

Minnesota Independent: News. Politics. Media. » ACLU: Afraid to say he’s gay, Larry Craig took wrong case to court

U.S. Sen. Larry Craig’s mistake wasn’t letting the clock run out on appealing his airport bathroom sex-solicitation case to the Minnesota Supreme Court — it was bringing the wrong case in the first place. That’s the view of Charles Samuelson, executive director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota (ACLU-MN), who thinks that a refusal to acknowledge his homosexuality impeded Craig’s ability to make his legal arguments.

In an interview with the Minnesota Independent, Samuleson didn’t disagree with Craig attorney Tom Kelly, who said that asking the state’s high court to take the former Idaho senator’s appeal “would have been a futile exercise.”

“[The Supreme Court] can only take what his lawyers bring,” Samuelson said, and Craig had his attorneys bring only “a very small and limited technical issue about his guilty plea.”

But Samuelson said an appeal might have been effective had Craig made civil liberties arguments that the ACLU-MN raised in a friend-of-the-court brief. “Our issues would probably be more attractive to the [state] Supreme Court,” Samuelson said...