I remember my mother telling the salesperson at the store that I needed dungarees in “husky,” which was the description used because “fatso” wasn’t good for marketing. I was young and, though not obese, not thin. I was chubby, and so I required “husky” jeans to fit me. Here’s the thing: I didn’t like the idea that I needed to wear husky dungarees, but that was my husky reality at the time.

I grew out of it somewhat, although I’ve never been a thin person. I never had washboard abs, I was never in the running for Calvin Klein underwear model. Yet, I somehow managed to attract the most beautiful woman in the world and get her to marry me. Life’s good. So I will not be anyone’s victim.

A Google search of “getting your body ready for the beach” produces hundreds of millions of hits, often accompanied by ads for products that promise to whip you into shape. Yet, as ever, modern women are pushing back.

Continue reading →

The bastardization of reality known as “trauma-informed” approach to investigation, promoted by those who believe that female victims of sex crimes suffer for lack of belief, has proven itself wonderful for the sensibilities of women and pretty awful for ascertaining the facts of whether an offense happened and who did it. So naturally, the same pseudo-science upon which it relies has found its way into education. Not just Title IX issues, but how public school teachers address their students.

The viral post, shared by a veteran teacher, explained how she had her students write down the emotional baggage they were carrying around, wad up the papers, and toss them across the room. Each student then picked up a random paper and read it to the class. Students could share if they wrote it or remain anonymous. The teacher described how the students were moved by the activity, and how she felt it helped them develop empathy for one another. The bag of wadded papers hangs by the door to remind students “they are not alone, they are loved, and we have each other’s back.”

The faddish notion is that if you write down your problems and throw them away, you’ve somehow shed your problems, the “baggage” you secretly carry with you. Before they got tossed, they got read aloud so that other students would realize they aren’t alone in their fears, their pain, their feelings. Continue reading →

Deputy Miranda knocked on Sheriff Roy’s office door.

“Sheriff?”

“Yes, Deputy…um, “Si, Señor?”

Miranda sighed. “With all due respect, Sheriff, I don’t know if you’re screwing with me or if this is a good faith effort to show me some respect due to my Latinx heritage. You know I speak English fluently. You knew that when you hired me.” Continue reading →

Within the Department of Justice is a group of lawyers doing the lawyering for the Executive Branch of government. It reputedly has the best and brightest lawyers the DoJ has to offer, which would make sense since it’s lawyering for lawyers. It’s called the Office of Legal Counsel, and it’s putative mission is to be the legal adviser to a branch of government, including the president.

[T]he Office of Legal Counsel provides legal advice to the President and all executive branch agencies.  The Office drafts legal opinions of the Attorney General and provides its own written opinions and other advice in response to requests from the Counsel to the President, the various agencies of the Executive Branch, and other components of the Department of Justice.  Such requests typically deal with legal issues of particular complexity and importance or those about which two or more agencies are in disagreement.  The Office is also responsible for reviewing and commenting on the constitutionality of pending legislation.

Continue reading →

There are two things that invariably happen simultaneously when the wrong person is arrested. An innocent person gets burned and a guilty person remains free to do more harm. Even if one isn’t important enough to get the cops and prosecution off its butt to figure out whether it has the right guy, the other should be.

Charging documents state a male entered the couple’s home armed with a gun. Two cell phones were stolen, two teeth were knocked out of the family’s dog mouth and both the man and the woman assaulted.

The woman was raped and sodomized, court records state. Other details of their physical injuries weren’t made available.

Continue reading →

Unsurprisingly, Felicia Somnez took issue with Emily Yoffe’s lengthy post about the destruction of Jon Kaiman’s world. She had been offered the opportunity to participate, to “tell her story,” beforehand, but declined. Only afterward did she take issue, and then with a vengeance.

In her 8,000-word story, there was a lot Ms. Yoffe got wrong, so please forgive the length.

What one person perceives as wrong isn’t necessarily wrong, but rather not the story told her way. It used to be that every person was the hero of their own story. Now, every person is the victim of her own story, and Somnez was certainly her own victim. That doesn’t make her the victim. Continue reading →

In the olden days, when there was a dispute that couldn’t be resolved between people, the ultimate response might be, “See you in court.” It wasn’t because everybody liked to hang out in courtrooms, but because they were built to serve a purpose, a place where judges and litigants and, on occasion, juries would do law stuff.

Maybe Judge Richard Berman didn’t get the memo?

“The fact I will never have a chance to face my predator in court eats away at my soul,” said Jennifer Araoz, who has accused Mr. Epstein of raping her when she was a 15-year-old student at a performing arts high school in New York. “They let this man kill himself and kill the chance of justice for so many others in the process, taking away our ability to speak.”

Continue reading →

To read the story is to invite the usual outrage at prosecutorial misconduct resulting in the wrongful conviction of an innocent defendant, the worst our legal system can produce.

A St. Louis judge dismissed a motion for a new trial Friday in the case of a prisoner the top prosecutor there says is innocent.

In denying the motion, 22nd Circuit Judge Elizabeth Hogan said in her ruling that the request to vacate Lamar Johnson’s 1995 murder conviction was 24 years too late. Missouri laws do not allow her to review such claims, she found.

Continue reading →

At his first trial, Bill Cosby’s jury hung. At his second trial, it convicted. There was one overarching tactical shift between the two, that the prosecution was allowed to call witnesses, introduce evidence, of uncharged crimes for the purpose of tainting Cosby, notwithstanding the evidence of guilt for the crimes with which he stood charged. It worked.

With trial coming, although now pushed off to January, 2020, the New York County DA’s office is facing a similar tactical problem, and as was learned from the Cosby experience, its ability to get a conviction is substantially increased by the volume of prejudice it can dump on the defendant even if the evidence is lacking. So it obtained a superseding indictment to include the testimony of Sopranos actress Annabella Sciorra.

Ms. Sciorra, who first shared her story in 2017 with The New Yorker, said that Mr. Weinstein had dropped her off at her apartment in Gramercy Park after a film industry dinner in New York. The producer later appeared at her door, she told the magazine, and pushed his way into her apartment. Continue reading →

Much of the story is utterly commonplace, as home burglar alarms get tripped all the time, and the police showing up is kind of the point. So what’s the problem here?

[Kazeem] Oyeneyin said a friend stayed over that night and tripped the alarm unknowingly when he left. Oyeneyin says he disengaged it and went back to sleep.

“I just laid back down and all I heard was somebody screaming downstairs,” he said. “So I grab my firearm because I don’t know what’s going on. And I run down the stairs and it’s a cop.”

“Hey come out with your hands up,” the officer yells from the door as Oyeneyin is still upstairs.

The good news is that the obvious concern, at the stage where cops confront a guy with a gun, isn’t the story, because it didn’t happen. Continue reading →