Just as you feel the bile rising in your throat because another lawyer proclaims himself the best thing since sliced bread on the internet, something comes along to make you laugh.  Meet AppellateSquawk, another anonymous PD blawg that reminds us that misery loves company.

Who is this n00b?

Law was Squawk’s second choice in life. Our first choice was anything else.

Squawk attended the Acme School of Law & Refrigerator Repair and graduated number 398 in a class of 400 after calling the Property professor a horse’s ass. The professor predicted that our sense of outrage would make us a wonderful advocate and flunked us out.

Did he say refrigerator repair? I like him already.  And already, he’s been kicked off some of the most self-important blogs around.

The other day, the blogversation turned to Perry v. New Hampshire, which is about whether the DA can use a dodgy eyewitness identification so long as it wasn’t “police-arranged.” “Police-arranged” means the cops throw your client in handcuffs against the patrol car and tell the hysterical witness, “We’ve caught the scumbag.”

We had a few thoughts, having noticed that all those funky old Supreme Court cases from back in the ’70′s never said that the purpose of precluding suggestive i.d.’s is to slap the police on the wrist. They were worried about convicting the wrong person. Even before DNA exonerations and eyewitness experiments where nobody notices a gorilla walking into the classroom, at least some judges knew that one person can be mistaken for another pretty easily.

So if the i.d. is so unreliable that it risks getting the wrong person convicted, the DA shouldn’t be allowed to use it, no matter where it came from.

We thought we’d share this with the luminaries of SCOTUSblog, since nobody else had made this particular point. And darned if we didn’t get a prissy e-mail back saying they were giving our comment the heave-ho because “the author didn’t use their real name” [sic sic sic].

And he shares some similar ideas about the greater glory of harmless error.

Of all the professions claiming to be based on reason rather than revelation, only law makes a positive virtue of refusing to correct its own mistakes. We love it when an appellate decision recites a string of outrageous trial errors but finds them all harmless because the defendant was guilty anyway. As if only innocent people should get a fair trial.

What if doctors were like that? “Okay, so we cut off the wrong leg. But it’s clearly harmless because you’d be one-legged even if we’d cut off the right one.”

I know, I love unidexter jokes too!  With all this, he still has a soft spot for safety of those who have dedicated their lives to protecting and serving.

One of our appeals involved a cop who punched a man in the head for refusing to explain why he was walking through the lobby of his own building. Guess who was convicted of assault causing physical injury? The tenant, of course. His head had caused the cop to sprain his wrist.

So pity the poor NYPD cops getting hurt while arresting peaceful Occupy Wall St. demonstrators last night. Did they get blisters from wielding their clubs, or breathe their own pepper spray? Or get tangled up in those plastic handcuffs that they carry by the bundle in gleeful anticipation of making lots and lots of arrests, not to mention overtime pay?

Just when you think that there won’t be another new blawger with half a brain and a sense of humor, with nothing to sell and no marketing scheme up their sleeve, somebody comes along to bring a smile to your face and something worth the few minutes it takes to read. 

AppellateSquawk just destroyed my newly discovered world view that the blawgosphere is dead and we’re all doomed to watch Larry Bodine webinars.  That his failure to link to anybody and let us know he existed is a testament to his public defender-y lack of interest in self-promotion, selfish though it may be. 

Note to good blawgers: Would you be kind enough to let us know you exist without making us work so hard to find you? Trust me, the crap ones are on us hourly for a link exchange. Thank you. 

In any event, I welcome Squawk, now that Dennis Murphy told me he existed, to the blawgosphere, late perhaps but at least not never. I just hope he’s not a girl, or I’ve wasted a ton of male pronouns.