Most cases at the Supreme Court involve solemn stuff, but now and then a case comes along that warms the court's cool corridors. Such was the case last year of Norman Skeens and his rooster.
Skeens, an attorney by trade, dwells with his wife on a one-acre ranchette in Glandale, Ariz. In 1993, the city adopted a zoning ordinance that contained the following pertinent language, to wit:"The raising of poultry, with the exception of male fowl, is permitted provided they are kept within a fence or cage."
Skeens ran afoul of the lwa. Thee lived on his property one Polish Crested rooster, Einstein by name, indubitably male, and hence unlawful. The city of Glendale, put on notice of the rooster's criminal presence, charged its owner accordingly.
The case went to trial in the Superior Court of Maricopa County, the Hon. Thomas Dunevant III presiding. The defendant undertook to prove by certified decibel readings that the braying of a nearby resident donkey was louder than the crowing of his Polish Crested rooster.
The court would not be swayed. Judge Dunevant found the defendant guilty as charge and fined him $450. Appeals to higher state courts proved fruitless. On April 14, 1997, the case of Skeens vs. Arizona made it to the docket of the highest court in the land.
The petitioner argued that Einstein's reville "is not a nuisance per se." He cited a Louisiana case in 1945: "We cannon conceive of a normal person endowed with ordinary sensibilities and ordinary habits, being greatly discomforted by the announcement of a new day from the well-trained voice of a stately cock."
He argued the irrationality of the Glendale ordinance. In an emotional appeal to the high court's keen sense of invidious discrimination, he pointed out that the ordinance would allow a resident to keep on a ranchette "two neighing horses, two braying donkeys, two mooing cows, six barking dogs, 200 honking geese, 200 clucking chickens, 200 shrieking conure birds" - and a partridge in a pear tree. But not one rooster.
Alas, the petition laid an egg. On June 23, without comment, the high court refused to hear the case.
A similar fate befell David Keanu Sai of Honolulu in his role as ambassador of the Hawaiian Kingdom to the United States. Last November, he invoked the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction with a suit against President Clinton. His purpose was to nullify the 1959 act of statehood and to restore the kingdom to the successors of Queen Liliuokalani.
Another eyebrow lifter was filed in the high court last June by Kermit Franklin Junior of Kalispell, Mont. He wanted to bring suit in U.S. District Court in Missoula and proposed to pay the $150 filing fee in American Eagle gold bullion coins. The clerk tried to deposit the coins, but the bank wouldn't take them. The court then ordered him to py up in ordinary legal tender, but Junior persisted and the court dismissed his suit.
We haven't heard much talk of gold bullion at the high court since the legal tender cases of 1870, but it's a fiar topic. Anyhow, it beats the tedium of tax law.
Universal Press Syndicate.