There are two lessons that must be retaught every time a change is made to locales that tax based on the market value of real property. The first is that people don’t have a firm grasp of how taxes are assessed. The second is that people burned by the reassessment, meaning that their taxes will increase, will be outraged.

Nassau County, New York, is engaged in a reassessment, necessitated by myriad failures, both political and factual, but driven by a billion dollar hole produced by successful tax grievances that had to be repaid. The irony here is that half the billion went neither to the county nor the taxpayers, but to the cottage industry of tax grievance representatives, who took a 50% cut of the taxes they saved residents.

When people’s real estate taxes went up, they blamed the county, assuming it reflected a tax increase rather than a redistribution of taxes. In fairness, Nassau County real estate taxes are astronomical, but most of that is based on local school taxes, where per-pupil-spending exceeds $20,000. But since the county handles the assessment, how the pain is spread out comes back to the county, and makes the county the butt of ire. Continue reading →

They recalled Aaron Persky. Judge Michael Corey in Alaska felt the sting. And Judge Ralph Strother is next on the list. But it’s unlikely that you’ve ever heard the name Donna Jo McDaniel.

Longtime Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Donna Jo McDaniel, who recently was removed from two sex offender cases by the state Superior Court, has submitted her resignation.

She was on the bench for 33 years. She served as administrative judge for a while. And she was removed from two sex offender cases. So why didn’t the mob go after her, pitchforks in hand?

In it, the judge wrote that she was honored to serve previously as the administrative judge in the criminal division and also as the county’s first female president judge. Continue reading →

Justin Dillon wrote an op-ed for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the proposed changes in Title IX sex adjudication, which opened with a curious line.

Thank God for Betsy DeVos.

It’s not clear what God has to do with it, nor even DeVos, for that matter. The changes are a fairly tepid undoing of a radical and subconstitutional system unilaterally created by an unelected bureaucrat who abused her position to ram her agenda down the throats of American universities based upon a series of lies that took decades to become the accepted narrative. But that was Justin’s choice, to open by thanking God, and to thank God for Betsy DeVos. Continue reading →

The plea deal outraged many, as is becoming a common theme. They hear the accusations and, because they believe, demand an outcome that may bear no connection with reality. Maybe the accusations aren’t true. Maybe they aren’t provable. Maybe the witness is awful or the gaps in evidence too deep to ignore. Maybe there are other reasons, which a prosecutor and judge must consider even if the unduly passionate do not, that go into the decision to offer the plea.

In the trenches, decisions get made, whether people who have never stepped foot in the well like it or not. And so the deal was cut with Jacob Anderson.

A former fraternity president at Baylor University who was accused of raping a female student in 2016 will avoid jail time and will not have to register as a sex offender, under a plea deal approved on Monday in Waco, Tex.

The agreement, which has roiled Waco and drawn howls of outrage nationally, calls for the accused man, Jacob Anderson, 23, to serve three years of probation, pay a $400 fine and attend counseling; his plea may never show up on his record.

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The question is fair, even if Matty Yglesias at Vox can’t control the impulse to begin his argument with the worst possible reason.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the biggest star in the Democratic Party, and she has been ever since she unseated Rep. Joe Crowley in a surprise primary upset in May. That her win didn’t, in the final analysis, launch a wave of leftist primary victories only goes to show what a phenomenon she personally is.

Not everyone shares her brand of politics, of course, but her constituency has exploded beyond the initial set of ideologues who powered the challenge to Crowley because of her incredible wit, charisma, social media savvy, and basic political smarts.

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Lara Bazelon wrote about a very real, if rarely mentioned, problem with Title IX campus sex tribunals. Black males are disproportionately accused by white females. Letters were sent to the New York Times about Bazelon’s op-ed, and they carefully selected which to publish. One was from Amelia W., last name withheld to protect her privacy.

The letter to the editor begins with a dubious assertion.

The story Ms. Bazelon relates about a rape accusation was never hers to tell. It’s mine.

This sentence reflects problems on a great many levels. Much as students have adopted a belief, utterly without basis but strongly held nonetheless, that they are entitled to be out in public, protesting, speaking, standing up for their cause, but not to be taped, recorded or reported on without their consent, they believe they own something because they choose to believe. Continue reading →

The problem came to light by an effort to help a student, which is generally considered the sort of thing one would want a high school teacher to do. But Peter Vlaming did it wrong.

Witnesses described a “slip-up” when the student was about to run into a wall and Vlaming told others to stop “her.”

The problem is that the school had been informed that the student was no longer a “her.”

Over the summer, the ninth-grade student’s family informed the school system of the student’s gender transition to male.

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I don’t know how many people I have sentenced. But it must be well over 1,000 since I became a district judge in 1992. One year, I kept track. I sentenced over 200 folks that year alone. Anyway, I got to thinking about vengeance.

Not often, but once in a great while, I am terribly upset, angered and sickened by a defendant’s abuse of a victim. In those cases, some might say that I act like an avenging angel at sentencing.

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There weren’t enough chairs, so Jazmine Headley sat on the floor. Rather than get an apology from the security people at the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program office in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, for treating her and her 1-year-old son so poorly for being poor, Headley was treated to a lesson in compliance when they called in the NYPD to teach her a lesson.

The New York Times takes progressive NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to task for being too de Blasio. Continue reading →

On Pearl Harbor Day, 2018, Trump signed into law the Amy, Vicky, and Andy Child Pornography Victim Assistance Act of 2018 (AVAA). Not only was there a name change, with the addition of Andy from the originally proposed Amy and Vicky Act, but there was a far more substantive change as well.

[T]he Act requires a court sentencing a defendant convicted of a child pornography crime harming a victim to determine the full amount of that victim’s losses and then to order restitution from a defendant for amount reflecting the defendant’s relative role in the causal process. (Sec. 3(a)(2)(B)). But — and here’s a new innovation — a trial court must impose restitution in the minimum amount of $3,000.

They may call it restitution, but it’s a $3,000 fine that offsets the amount of restitution to be determined. And this is the good news, as the originally proposed amounts were astronomically higher. Continue reading →