Author Archives: SHG

Wrong, But Misleading the Mag Wasn’t the Reason

The conduct of the feds in shutting down a private vault, a business that provided safe deposit boxes to individuals, was one thing. What they subsequently did with the boxes, and the contents, is quite another.

But the business also had legit customers with legit boxes containing legit private property with no connection to any offense. And the court issuing the warrant properly limited the authority to search and seize only to those boxes for which probable cause existed. What the court neglected to do was accommodate the legit boxes protection and privacy from the only entity with the capacity to violate their owners’ rights, the government. Continue reading →

Is Sex A “Social Construct” To A Muslim Prisoner?

There would inevitably be clashes of newly imagined “rights” which took for granted that the newer, woker ones weren’t zero-sum games even though there was no possibility it could be anything else. But the idea that a clash in a Wisconsin prison would pit gender identity against religion probably wasn’t high on anyone’s list of “what could possibly go wrong.” Yet, it did.

The decision stems from a 2017 lawsuit brought by Wisconsin state inmate Rufus West against the administration of the Green Bay Correctional Institution, where he was incarcerated at the time. In July 2016, the prison required West, a Muslim man also known as Muslim Mansa Lutalo Iyapo, to submit to a routine strip-search following a visit from an outside friend. West did not object to the search, but he did object to who was helping conduct it: a transgender prison guard named Isaac Buhle.

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When Cops Aren’t Psychologically Stable

There’s a slogan, ACAB, which came out of the reality, largely revealed by pervasiveness of video over the past decade, that there are a lot, far too many, police officers who engage in acts of such cruelty and depravity toward other human beings that it’s difficult, if not impossible to square their actions with what any decent human being would do under the circumstances.

This isn’t all cops. This isn’t all conduct by cops which the unduly passionate condemn because the outcome fails to meet their fantasy world views. But it happens with more than sufficient frequency to give rise to a very serious question of whether guns and shields are being given to people who are psychologically unfit to exercise the authority they’re given. All the training in the world, any accreditation required, means little if the guy holding the gun breaks under stress. Continue reading →

Halkides: Flawed Investigation of USS Bonhomme Richard Fire

Ed. Note: Chris Halkides has been kind enough to try to make us lawyers smarter by dumbing down science enough that we have a small chance of understanding how it’s being used to wrongfully convict and, in some cases, execute defendants. Chris graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and teaches biochemistry, organic chemistry, and forensic chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

In July, 2020 a fire reduced the USS Bonhomme Richard to scrap, costing the Navy over a billion dollars. The navy’s investigation showed that there were failures at many levels of command. Yet, against the advice of one of its own judges, the Navy is trying Seaman Ryan Mays. Continue reading →

If Insurers Ran Police Departments

Most of the time, people consider involving insurance companies in police action when it comes to cops covering their own losses in § 1983 cases. This arose as an unfortunate collateral error by those seeking to eliminate qualified immunity, who harped on cops “getting away with it” because of QI, which was extrapolated to losses being paid by the municipalities or insurance. That’s the cost of exaggerating and dissembling, but I digest.

There is another time when insurance comes into play, as reflected in a Washington Post  “Investigation” that begins with the requisite anecdote. Continue reading →

Only The Worky Parts

The other day, someone twitted that baby lawyers shouldn’t suffer abuse at work, and if they are abused, should find a healthier place to work. This was an utterly banal expression, but for one thing. What’s “abuse” mean? Was it the obvious, physical violence, racial epithets, throwing items and personal insults, or was it criticizing poor work without sandwiching it between compliments? Was anything short of a tummy rub abusive? Was it like rape, whatever the “survivor” says it is?

Some reactions were somewhat informative, including yelling and screaming as “abuse,” but others reacted with unsurprising outrage, that only an abuser would not know what “abuse” means, proving yet again that no amount of education can fix stupid. But I digress. Continue reading →

When All You Have Is A Sledge Hammer

Every once in a while, a video appears that serves as a sort of litmus test of one’s perspective toward police, teens, school and the use of force. The video of School Resource Officer Tyler McRae and 18-year-old high school student Tauris Sledge is one such video.

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Wheel Of Fortune

In most federal district courts, your case gets (figuratively) tossed into the wheel and you pull the judge who comes up. The odds can play out a bit differently in smaller districts and outlier courthouses, where only a few judges are bold enough to tread. For the most part, you file and live with the luck of the draw.

This is one of the points I’ve raised when reformers argue for judges plucked from the ranks of public defenders (but not private criminal defense lawyers, who defend icky people) or judges of various shades of pale. The point is that you don’t end up with some homogenized federal judiciary, where the courts are some common denominator of the various perspectives, experiences and biases of federal judges. A right wing and a left wing judge don’t produce two moderate judges. They produce two judges who might give wildly different decisions on the same set of facts. Is that what will “fix” the judiciary? Continue reading →

Scheme To Defraud or Fragile Ego

That Trump lied about, inflated, grossly exaggserated the value of his holding and hence his claimed net worth surprised no one with any knowledge of who he was.* That New York Attorney General Tish James took three plus years to figure this out is sad. But then, James needed more than to know the obvious. She needed to gather evidence of it, to prove it, and then she could use her offices as chief civil legal officer of New York to flex her limited corporate oversight muscles. And now she has, even coming up with her own cute catch phrase.

This isn’t the Art of the Deal. It’s the Art of the Steal.** Continue reading →