Among criminal defense blawgs, SJ is a fairly well known, fairly well regarded, blog. Enough so that even the louts at the ABA Journal, the ones who think  Legal Rebels are the lawyers who use a white iPhone after Labor Day, included it in their inaugural Blawg Hall of Fame.  Pretty darned special, right?

The point isn’t to warm the cockles of greatness, but the hope that someone out there might stumble upon a bit of information that enlightens them, and illuminates the life we endure in the streets and the trenches at the hands of police, judges, the Law. All the very important and very self-important lawyers might see that regular folks aren’t enjoying them or life nearly as much as they seem to think.

Then comes a hard smack, a la Moonstruck, to remind me just how inconsequential SJ really is.

Gawker posted a video yesterday. It apparently just came on Max Read’s radar, and he thought it worth spreading.  No issue there, as it’s good that Gawker, with its far (by a magnitude) larger audience sees this video.  I learned about it when my buddy Radley Balko retwitted a twit by Julian Sanchez, @Normative, about the video.  I was unimpressed, it being old news and all.

You see, the whole megillah was about a video out of Vegas that was the subject of a  post here on April 30th. I would have thought, hoped maybe, that Balko had read my post, seen the video, and was just retwitting the video now on Gawker to aid in its broader distribution. That’s cool, though he might have mentioned that if others had kept their eyes open, they would have known about it months ago. But no big deal, so I moved on.

Later in the day, I saw a post from my other buddy, Elie Mystal.  Now much as I make fun of  Above the Law from time to time, I like Elie, and I’ve had  good things to say about Elie. The baby lawyers at ATL say mean things about him, and he deserves better.  Elie is interested in criminal justice stuff, so it’s not like my expectation that he might have seen my earlier post was totally out of the ballpark. But this, well, pissed me off.

There is a disturbing video making its way around social media today. It’s a six-minute Family Court video from August 2011 of a woman who complains that a marshal sexually assaulted her in a back room.

Today?

But it also means that Doninger has been sitting on the bench for almost two years since this incident, with no investigation, review, or punishment for her disgraceful behavior caught on video.

What kind of system are we running here? I get that bad people slip through the cracks. But it’s been two years and Doninger, this magistrate who literally turned her back on a woman who was molested in her own courtroom, still has a job?

Could we at least get somebody sitting in her courtroom tomorrow to make sure Doninger isn’t looking away as people are violated right in front of her?

Could we at least get somebody at blogs that post any picture of a female lawyer partially naked within seconds of its becoming publicly available to show even remotely similar concern for outrageous abuse?

If the issue was that the video wasn’t deemed worthy of making it onto ATL’s pages, perhaps ousting a very important bit of news about a law firm whose fired secretary told about how they used Starbucks coffee in the cafeteria, or the next whiny self-promoter who begs for a link to his post that no one would otherwise read, that’s fair. Just because I find a story, a video, to be worth sharing doesn’t mean anyone else has to.

But apparently that wasn’t the case here. Elie obviously found the video outrageous, and more than worthy of a post.  The problem wasn’t that it wasn’t significant, but that it only surfaced yesterday when Gawker suddenly discovered it. 

That it appeared here last April?  It’s like it never existed.

Next time you think SJ matters, or any other criminal law blawg matters, and that it carries such great influence as to move molehills if not mountains, remember that not even friends, pals like Elie or Radley, can be bothered with it.  If even they can’t be bothered, it’s hardly worth noting that it doesn’t make a ripple in the puddles of the really, really important people’s minds.

Say, did you see that really outrageous video on Gawker yesterday?  Now that’s what matters.