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 →

There is no way Masoumeh Ebtekar, or “Screaming Mary” as she was known, should be allowed to enter or remain in the United States. She was the “spokesperson for the students who stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held fifty-two people hostage for over a year.” She deserves our condemnation. She earned it.

But Secretary of State Marco Rubio took his condemnation one step further.

Rubio tweeted:

Masoumeh Ebtekar – also known as “Screaming Mary” – was the spokeswoman for the Islamic terrorists who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days – subjecting them to beatings, starvation, and mock executions. . . . Her family should never have been allowed to benefit from the extraordinary privilege of living in our country. America can never become home for anti-American terrorists or their families – and under the Trump Administration, it never will.

Continue reading →

As it turned out, the pre-mistrial perception that the Lindsay Clancy jury was divided 11 to one was correct. With three jurors speaking out, it’s become clear that one juror, despite believing that the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, refused to vote for “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Eleven of twelve jurors had agreed not to convict Ms. Clancy. Then the one holdout “admitted he had reasonable doubt,” the jury’s forewoman, Roni Carlson, said in an interview with the television station NBC10 in Boston on Tuesday.

So that was the end of deliberations? Not quite. Continue reading →

My older sister walked me to Washington Elementary School, about a mile from my home, when I was in kindergarten. Then again, she was in fifth grade and attended the same school. When I entered first grade, I was on my own, like pretty much every other student. No one considered this unusual or problematic. The idea that kids shouldn’t be allowed to go places on their own was unthinkable at the time. Then again, the words “stranger” and “danger” had yet to be connected.

Not only has there been a distinct shift in the propriety of parents allowing their young (and not so young) children to be outside on their own, but other people observing children walking without a parent or guardian hovering over them have assumed a duty to call the police on other people for allowing their children to be “free range,” as Lenore Skenazy calls it. That’s what happened to Virginia mother Karyann Parkinson. Continue reading →

Being a criminal defense lawyer has, unsurprisingly, provided me with the opportunity to speak with a great many people who are inclined to commit crimes. It has allowed me to recognize the pathologies, the different worldview of people who put their self-interest above all else. Hard as it is for some to imagine, there are people who, for whatever reason, see the constraints of ethics, morality, virtues and humility as either the tools of fools or gambits to be played for one’s own advantage to win the game. There is, at least in their grasp of reality, nothing that matters except winning the game, and everything else is a mere weapon to be employed as needed to win.

Roy Cohn was such a person. So too is his weak-minded protégé. Continue reading →

When a trial ends with a hung jury, the law allows the case to be retried before a new jury. That’s the law, and it should be clear that any claim to the contrary is not the law. At least not yet.

The discharge of a deadlocked jury follows one of two events. The first is that the defendant moves or consents to the mistrial, which happens most of the time since a hung jury beats a conviction any day.  The second is the court finding of  “manifest necessity,” an urgent and overwhelming need to secure a fair trial. A deadlocked jury fills the bill. A deliberate act by prosecutors that compels a mistrial, such as showing the jury prejudicial inadmissible evidence, on the other hand, does not.

The rationale. as explained by justice Hugo Black in Wade v. Hunter, 1949, for permitting a retrial after a jury is unable to reach a unanimous verdict is, if nothing else, practical. Continue reading →