My kids have a school dance tonight. It’s my son’s first of middle school and one of the last my daughter will see at this particular grade level. And of course, because I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, I’m chaperoning everyone.

The school has a very interesting schedule for dances. Sixth graders come an hour before everyone else is allowed in. They dance and holler for an hour and none of the other kids are even in the building. After that first hour, the sixth graders are shuffled out and the seventh and eighth grades arrive for the big dance.

Personally I’m a fan of this system. Sixth grade is a weird enough age for kids. They don’t need to be mixing with their older peers at a dance. Does this make me a prude? Answer: Yes, and I’m quite comfortable with that, thank you very much. Continue reading →

The Supreme Court recognized that cellphones were different in Riley v. California. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals, with JFK airport, among others, within its jurisdiction, hadn’t yet joined the fray as district judges around the country tried to figure out whether cellphones at borders were controlled by the law as it applied to cellphones or as applied to borders. It’s now made its decision.

We do so now. First, we conclude that the district court properly denied Alisigwe’s motion to suppress evidence obtained at the border. Contrary to the district court’s reasoning, however reasonable suspicion was not required. The “longstanding recognition that searches at our borders without probable cause and without a warrant are nonetheless ‘reasonable’ has a history as old as the Fourth Amendment itself.” United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 619 (1977). Continue reading →

Rochester, New York resident David Streever was angry following the ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and let Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons know.

You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s
Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher.

The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the
videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end,
and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own
pathetic weakness.

You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden
of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself.
You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.

Strong words that conveyed strong feelings, which is exactly what the First Amendment is supposed to protect. That didn’t stop ICE agents from going to Streever’s home to issue him a “WARNING NOTICE”* that his email could land him in prison. Continue reading →

Three things happened on the same day. Judge Christopher Cooper rejected the attempt by the Kennedy Center board to circumvent his earlier order by putting Trump’s name on the building as “appropriate recognition” of his renovation and restoration of the structure. The Board closed the Kennedy Center immediately, in defiance of Judge Cooper’s order, calling it an emergency. Trump did what Trump does.

Continue reading →

The CEOs of the major Artificial Intelligence companies say it’s a potential existential threat to humanity.

The president’s statement followed a weekend essay from Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, calling for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development. Days earlier, one of Anthropic’s researchers quit and went public over his fears about the safety of the technology.

Other A.I. chiefs have voiced concerns of their own in recent days. Demis Hassabis, the chairman of Google DeepMind; Elon Musk of SpaceX; and Sam Altman of OpenAI have all endorsed calls for a slower pace.

Trump, on the other hand, is all in. Continue reading →

At Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene picked up on a Connecticut decision addressing an issue that has grown increasingly prominent, as well as lucrative, under the current administration: Pardons. Three things are indisputable about the plaintiff in DeBarros v. Pedbereznak.

On October 13, 1996, the plaintiff shot Jermaine Lewis several times and killed him. At the same time, the plaintiff, using a second gun, also shot Scott Nash several times and severely wounded him. As a result of the foregoing, the plaintiff was charged with murder, attempt to commit murder, and first degree assault with a firearm. At trial, although the plaintiff raised self defense as a defense to the charges, the plaintiff was convicted of all the charged offenses including murder in a jury trial and was sentenced to life in prison.

The plaintiff appealed the conviction and the Appellate Court ordered a new trial [link added -EV]. The second trial resulted in a hung jury. The plaintiff then entered into a plea deal, pled to manslaughter and served a lengthy but reduced prison term. In 2022, the plaintiff was pardoned.

DeBarros sued for defamation, as well as the usual emotional distress causes, for being called a “murderer” on a podcast during the course of his running for office. Defendants moved to dismiss, and the court, after noting that this case had every legal earmark going against the plaintiff, lowered the boom. Continue reading →

First, the assumption was that the Clancy deadlock was between the men and women on the jury, because it had to be women who would side with the defendant who killed her three children. It was wrong. Then, the assumption was that the one holdout juror was one of the white men on the jury, because of course the holdout had to be a white man who stood firm against the defendant who killed her three children. It was wrong. Then it turned out that the one holdout juror was a black man. What happened next was deeply and dangerously wrong.

The NBC10 Boston Investigators are uncovering new details about the lone holdout juror from the Lindsay Clancy murder trial. Continue reading →

It will come as little surprise that the $14,700,000 “repair” of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was the product of two failures. The first was the typical Trump rush to get this “signature” fix completed before the 250th anniversary festivities to celebrate Trump’s greatness, without adequate planning or competent performance. The no-bid contractor, that Trump either knew well or didn’t know at all according to which day he was asked, admitted that it blew the job. At least Atlantic Industrial Coatings is redoing its failed repairs under warranty, as the Reflecting Pool remains empty.

The second failure was Trump’s immediate resort to fabricating a lie to excuse his failure, because puny yet shameless people are incapable of admitting error. Rather than acknowledge that the self-proclaimed master builder might have been at fault, Trump insisted, and persisted in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that it couldn’t have been him, so it had to be radical left lunatics who took a box cutter to the American Flag Blue lining to cut a 100 250 300 350 foot gash in the lining, thus precluding any effort to correct the failing in favor of blaming his enemies. Continue reading →

Football season is here again, friends! The stadiums are packed with cheering fans, parking lots are full of tailgaters, and somehow I’ve once again decided the actions of a bunch of young men aged 18-23 will decide my mood on weekends for the rest of the year at minimum.

My beloved Tennessee Volunteers are in a bit of a rebuild again this year. Our quarterback is Faizon Brandon, a true freshman who looks like he’s got the potential to really make some waves this season. In his opening game against Furman, Brandon scored five touchdowns. The last QB to achieve that feat in the SEC was a fellow named Cam Newton. Continue reading →

As long-time readers will know, I’m reluctant to write about 9/11. It affected me greatly, having my office at the time on the 51st Floor of the Woolworth Building with my windows facing the twin towers. I knew people who didn’t survive. From my desk chair, I had a panoramic view of The Site (the rest of the country and the media called it “Ground Zero,” but those of us who were there called it “The Site”). There were body and airplane parts on the roofs of neighboring buildings below for the next year or so. I stopped looking out my office windows after 9/11.

My practice effectively ceased for more than six months following 9/11. The electric and telephones were lost for more than six months. I was allowed to enter the red zone because of my office location, and walked up the 51 floors to reach it. But there wasn’t much reason, as I couldn’t reach my clients, they couldn’t reach me, and without telephones, there would be no new cases. Continue reading →