From Millennials to Zoomers, the telephone is hated. There are, of course, the usual reasons, that too many calls are spam or robo crap, which can be weeded out by only answering calls when the Caller ID tells you it’s someone you know. But much as there are some collateral excuses, the fact remains that they hate talking on the phone. Given that my generation might share their annoyance of calls, but feels no dread and loathing at the thought of speaking directly to another human being, I wondered why.

So I asked. Continue reading →

We decided on a burger for dinner last night, so Five Guys it was. Dr. SJ did the ordering and, when she was done, informed me that my personal favorite, the bacon cheeseburger, was now $12.39. What? I quickly checked the google machine, and a website updated as of April, 2022, said it costs $8.69. But on the Five Guys online ordering website for the store by me, it was most definitely $12.39.

Continue reading →

It may have happened before, but if so, I’m unaware of it. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has now been confirmed by the Senate as a Supreme Court justice, but there’s a problem. The justice she would replace, Breyer, has yet to retire. He announced he would at the end of the term and there’s no reason to believe he won’t. But what if he changes his mind?

As Ed Whelan noted, the process for the appointment of a Supreme Court justice involves three distinct steps: Nomination, confirmation and appointment. KBJ has passed the first two, but the third won’t happen until the president signs off on her appointment, and that can’t happen until there is a vacancy. Until then, KBJ remains a judge of the D.C. Circuit. Continue reading →

Last week was vacation. We’d been looking forward to this for a while, as everyone in the office was extremely overworked.

My business partner was headed to the Dominican Republic for a week with family.

I had plans to do two things: jack and shit. Continue reading →

New York’s default governor, Kathy Hochul, has reached consensus on a new budget that includes money for a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills (whoever they are), billions for child care, a state gas tax holiday and “strengthening bail restrictions.” Why, you ask, would something relating to bail be in a state budget? It’s an election year.

It was 2019 when the NY lege, filled with brand new assemblypersons and senators, made a host of reforms based not on knowledge and experience, but the fevered wishes of the most progressive wing of the criminal defense side of the courtroom, and an interesting experiment was begun. With this budget, the experiment comes to its first end. Continue reading →

To the binary mind, it can’t be possible. If a cop shoots and kills someone, it’s either a good shoot or a crime, whereupon the cop is either prosecuted or it proves the system is corrupt and evil cops can get away with anything. Minnesota police officer Mark Hanneman shot and killed Amir Locke. It was a bad shoot. But it was no crime.

“Amir Locke’s life mattered,” Attorney General Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Michael Freeman, the Hennepin County attorney, said in a joint statement. “He was a young man with plans to move to Dallas, where he would be closer to his mom and — he hoped — build a career as a hip-hop artist, following in the musical steps of his father.”

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No reasonable lawyer would argue that discovery in criminal cases in New York wasn’t a disaster before. It was a nightmare. The statutory disclosure was minimal and damn near worthless. It wasn’t until  the eve of trial, if that, that you would get any discovery that mattered, and by then it was far too late to make use of it. More to the point, since most cases were disposed of by plea, it never happened.

You never saw the Brady material before copping a plea. Hell, you rarely saw Brady material if you went to trial. The prosecutor’s response to the defense demand for Brady was invariably “the prosecution is aware of its duty under Brady and will comply should any such material exist.” There was never any Brady, at least as far as the prosecution was concerned. So if they decided it doesn’t exist, there was nothing to turn over. No problem. Continue reading →

Much as the overhyped condemnation of qualified immunity has given rise to a great deal of misunderstanding of why it deserves condemnation, but not what the limits of its condemnation should be, add Monell liability to the mix and the confusion goes wild. In most cases, any award or settlement is paid by the municipality, even though a § 1983 case is brought against the individual who committed the constitutional rights violation. It’s not that the municipality is obliged to pay, as it’s not a party to the action, but that it chooses to indemnify its employees or, it’s feared, it wouldn’t have any employees.

When it comes to a lying prosecutor, that creates a dilemma, as prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity in the performance of their prosecutorial function. When it comes to a lying prosecutor in the office of notorious Williamson County, Texas district attorney Ken Anderson, of Michael Morton notoriety, the situation is bad enough to make your head explode. Continue reading →

Academics have been increasingly diligent in their search for novel problems to “fix” with solutions that create new and potentially worse problems, Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy notes a new law review article by Penn Prawf Kimberly Kessler Ferzan entitled “The Trouble with Time Served.” Who knew there was trouble?

Every jurisdiction in the United States gives criminal defendants “credit” against their sentence for the time they spend detained pretrial. In a world of mass incarceration and overcriminalization that disproportionately impacts people of color, this practice appears to be a welcome mechanism for mercy and justice. In fact, however, crediting detainees for time served is perverse. It harms the innocent. Continue reading →

My German son, David Meyer-Lindenberg, whose writings you’ve seen here and at Fault Lines, and who was my editor here for years before Beth, has been busy over the past six weeks doing what he could to save the life of his best friend, Misha. I’ll let David explain.

Let me tell you about my best friend, Mykhailo – Misha – who’s fighting for his life and the freedom of his country, Ukraine. We met in 2018, when we worked together in Washington, D.C. I assumed he’d pursue a career in the States, but he told me he wanted to go back to Ukraine, that his country needed him.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Misha put down his smartphone and picked up a rifle. Continue reading →