More than six months after a two second encounter, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department released its “findings” about the murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, because “’Transparency is essential for an intelligent discussion of the important issues raised by this case,’ said Timothy McGinty, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor.”

Transparency does not come from the video of Tamir’s death. It doesn’t come from the decision of Judge Adrine that probable cause appears for prosecution.  According to the New York Times, it comes from the sheriff’s report.

But the sheriff’s investigation provided the clearest picture yet about what happened on Nov. 22 outside the neighborhood recreation center that Tamir frequented, and where just before the shooting he had been using a newly acquired fake gun that looked strikingly like the real thing.

Continue reading →

On the twitters, my pal, Eric Mayer, showed me video after video of men and women walking about in public wearing military uniforms, pretending to be soldiers when the closest they came to being in harm’s way was a paper cut.  Unsurprisingly, real soldiers and former soldiers, of which Eric is proudly one, take umbrage at the poseurs.

As can be seen in this video, it’s something that sufficiently disturbs those whose lives were at risk that they feel compelled to go out of their way to test, and to prove, that others are liars.  Stolen valor.

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It is a US Supreme Court precedent based upon The Constitution. If you read the case, the reason the doctrine exist is that police aren’t going to be asked to wait until they are shot or stabbed or punched or otherwise hurt—to wait until the threat materializes and causes physical harm to them. They are privileged by The Constitution to use deadly force in those situations where see a threat to them.

— Judge John P. O’Donnell, Politico, June 12, 2015

Up to now, the discussion out of Ohio had been that Judge O’Donnell was one of those “academic” judges, smart but still a judge.

As for his acquittal after a bench trial of Cleveland Police Officer Michael Brelo for killing Timothy Russell and Melissa Williams after leaping on the hood of their car and firing 15 rounds directly through the windshield into their bodies, the locals took issue with Judge O’Donnell’s “but for” analysis only because it had never before appeared in Ohio law and was completely novel and without precedent. Inside baseball details. Continue reading →

Remind me again what you won the Nobel Prize for? Oh wait, you didn’t. But Tim Hunt did for Physiology or Medicine in 2001 for groundbreaking work on cell division.  So the 72-year-old Nobel Prize winner wise-cracked a quasi-joke?

“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” Mr. Hunt said Monday at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea. “Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”

It fell like a lead balloon, as the room went dead silent.  But then, Connie St Louis, the director of the science journalism program at City University London, took to the twitters to spread the outrage of another Brit who tells a bad joke.

Some female scientists responded by using sarcasm: Continue reading →

When the kids get home and dad asks what happened at camp today, maybe they will finally say more than “nuttin.”  From CBS Local in Miami:

Fritz was reportedly shot by an officer Thursday morning at 350 NW 13th Street, near Gibson Park in Overtown. Police say the shooting occurred just outside the nearby library’s entrance.

The dead man, Fritz Severe (when is the last time a media reported a killing and used the first, rather than last, name of the deceased?), was mentally ill and homeless, but a regular in the area.  Also in the area was a group of about 50 children from a summer camp.

[Witness Nichelle] Miller was at the park when it happened – so were about 50 children who were apart of the summer camp. Continue reading →

The other Mark W. Bennett, the one confirmed by the United States Senate, found himself in an untenable, and unacceptable, situation, as told by Eli Saslow in the Washington Post.

U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett entered and everyone stood. He sat and then they sat. “Another hard one,” he said, and the room fell silent. He was one of 670 federal district judges in the United States, appointed for life by a president and confirmed by the Senate, and he had taken an oath to “administer justice” in each case he heard. Now he read the sentencing documents at his bench and punched numbers into an oversize calculator. When he finally looked up, he raised his hands together in the air as if his wrists were handcuffed, and then he repeated the conclusion that had come to define so much about his career.

“My hands are tied on your sentence,” he said. “I’m sorry. This isn’t up to me.”

These are perverse words for a United States District Court Judge to utter. After all, what position is better described as “master of his own domain” than a federal judge? Yet, there they are, laid out for all to see. “My hands are tied.” Continue reading →

Have neo-feminists won the battle of rape on campus?  Enough so, apparently, that they’re ready to move on to the next offense to gender to be “fixed” in the college star chamber.  Spokesgal for the future victims, Amanda Marcotte, gives the talking points:

Katie Baker at BuzzFeed has a new piece out about one of the less attention-getting aspects of Title IX: that it’s supposed to protect students against domestic violence as well as sexual assault. 

“The next wave of Title IX activism, researchers and activists say, will focus on how colleges investigate allegations of and provide resources to students in abusive relationships,” Baker writes. “And it’s going to be just as complicated and contentious.”

It seems like only yesterday when neo-feminists were railing about how one in five women will be raped in college, demanding that we believe accusers who almost never lie. Good times. Continue reading →

Time for another wrap up of the past week at Fault Lines, with some damn fine stuff.  This week, we’ve added a new writer, Ken Womble, who is a criminal defense lawyer in Brooklyn, having paid his dues in the trenches as public defender.  And if that’s not enough to get you cranking, we have my old buddy Ron Kuby and Allan Brenner guest-posting as well. Damn fine stuff.

CONCEALING FREDDIE GRAY’S AUTOPSY SERVES NO ONE

CREATIVE JUSTICE: WHEN SENTENCES FOCUS ON SHAME

MCKINNEY COP PLACED ON LEAVE AFTER CHOKESLAMMING 15 YEAR OLD GIRL

LEAVE THE GUN, TAKE THE VIBRATOR

SCOTUS’ MESSAGE IN MELLOULI: NO ONE SHOULD BE DEPORTED BECAUSE THEY WEAR SOCKS

PEOPLE TO NYPD COMMISSIONER BRATTON: #NOROBOCOPS

THE CRIME OF PUNISHMENT

Read them all. No, I mean it. Read them all. Do it for the children.

Tamir Rice was executed on November 22, 2014.  The 12-year-old was mowed down by bullets fired by Cleveland cop Timothy Loehmann in an encounter lasting less than two seconds.  Yet, it remains in stasis, awaiting the promise of Cleveland officials to make a decision about whether to prosecute Loehmann, Rice’s killer, and his partner, Frank Garmback.  It’s too long. Much too long. Absurdly too long.

Tired of waiting, and distrustful of the eventual outcome regardless, “community leaders,” whoever that may be, have decided to invoke an archaic procedural backdoor to initiate prosecution.  Section 2935.09 of the Ohio Revised Statutes provides:

(B) In . . . order to cause the arrest or prosecution of a person charged with committing an offense in this state, a peace officer or a private citizen having knowledge of the facts shall comply with this section.

***

(D) A private citizen having knowledge of the facts who seeks to cause an arrest or prosecution under this section may file an affidavit charging the offense committed with a reviewing official for the purpose of review to determine if a complaint should be filed by the prosecuting attorney or attorney charged by law with the prosecution of offenses in the court or before the magistrate. A private citizen may file an affidavit charging the offense committed with the clerk of a court of record . . ..

And apparently, that’s exactly what happened. Continue reading →

My fellow curmudgeon, Mark Herrmann, nails another peevish problem that makes any serious lawyer’s head explode. Well, he doesn’t call us “serious lawyers.” He calls us “compulsive nutcases.” Curmudgeons can be very mean.

Once, for example, we asked a client to deliver a list containing the names of the (few thousand) members of a class for us to use at a settlement hearing. We told the client that the list was very important; we needed it before the specified deadline, and the list had to be accurate.

The client seemed to understand those words.

Just before the deadline, the client told us that other work had gotten in the way, and the client could not provide the list on time.

And, per Mark’s story, the client proceeded to blow it the next time around, and the time after that, because the admonition that “the list had to be accurate” was understood to mean, throw something together, and don’t worry too much if its completely wrong. Continue reading →