It has no traffic light, and the only commercial enterprise in town is a Dollar Store, which is still a bit pricey for the residents of Brookside, Alabama.

Brookside until recently was known for its quirky Russian food festival and the state’s only onion-domed Russian Orthodox Church. It’s a former mining town, its population about the same as it was a decade ago. Fewer than 100 of its residents graduated college.

Brookside is a poor town, 70% white, 21% Black, with a small but growing Hispanic population and a median income well below the state average. The town survives on the fringes of Birmingham with tax revenue from the Dollar General, which forms the totality of its commercial district.

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Much as we’re understanding drug addiction, as a stand alone state, to be a health problem, the need to get the next fix causes people to do terrible things. Patrick Baker, 43, did something terrible.

Posing as a United States marshal, Mr. Baker killed Donald L. Mills Jr. during a home invasion in May 2014, the U.S. attorney’s office said. Mr. Mills’s wife and children were held at gunpoint while Mr. Baker ransacked the home for oxycodone pills, the office said.

In 2017, Baker was convicted in Kentucky state court of reckless homicide and robbery, and sentenced to 19 years in prison. His incarceration didn’t last long. Continue reading →

The purpose of Emily’s List is about as clear as it gets.

OUR MISSION

We elect Democratic pro-choice women to office.

Three criteria for funding in one concise sentence, that they be Democrats, pro-choice and female. Fair enough. This is the glory of our American democracy, that you can support candidates for the reasons that matter to you, good or bad, and Emily’s List has its reasons. Continue reading →

When the news broke, it was unsurprising that Above The Law’s Kathryn Rubino, whose only cognizable legal skill is brutally vapid snark, seized upon it. After all, it had all the makings of a salacious story at the new, woke ATL, the smart, witty ATL birthed by David Lat having long since been murdered in the name of selling advertisements and gaining the eyeballs of the woke T14 kids.

There was a conservative law student, and she was a RACIST!!! Well, at least that’s what someone said.

I’d say Crystal Clanton just keeps failing upwards, but given that outrage is currency in right-wing circles, it is more accurate to say that her career is progressing on schedule. Do you remember why Clanton first became a news story? It’s been a minute, so I’ll cover the deets. 

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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.

When we think of screening tests for drugs, roadside or airport seizures come to mind. However, a great deal of testing is also performed involving incarcerated individuals, both for consumed and seized drugs. In January, the New York State Office of the Inspector General issued a report on a scandal involving the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which had been using tests from the Microgenics Corporation. Continue reading →

There was a time when the Senate was known as the world’s greatest deliberative body, dignified and invariably courteous, unlike the 435 dirty groundlings who squabbled ceaselessly in the House of Representatives. And then it ended with partisan political paralysis, putting party above country and preferring games to compromise.

While the issue of the moment is voting legislation, the “fix” is the filibuster. An invented procedure, with a somewhat tainted history of changes from the number needed for cloture to the mechanics of reading the phonebook while praying for strong bladder control, it has a point. If a simple majority was sufficient to impose fundamental change on a nation, it would empower a majority of one to tyranny. Continue reading →

President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law on August 6, 1965. It was a revolutionary law, as there is no such thing as a national election. Every state runs its own election, including its own representatives, senators and presidential electors, to send to Washington to do its bidding, so the federal government had no role in the mechanics of state elections until then.

Martin Luther King pushed Johnson to make it the federal government’s business because states were affirmatively preventing black people, called Negroes at the time by polite society, from registering and voting. Continue reading →

Why not just ask 100 five-year-olds to pick a president? Ridiculous, you say. They know nothing of the world, the issues, the problems or the candidates. Their vote would be pointless, worthless. It would be undemocratic. But then, are we doing any better asking ten million voters to vote who have little better grasp of the issues and candidates than the toddlers?

To try to blunt the obvious assumptive leap, this isn’t to start an argument about testing voters knowledge as a qualification to vote. Not only would that be unconstitutional, but there is no way it could be accomplished without abuse. It would be a terrible idea and I suggest no such thing, even if all the recent talk of voter suppression pushes your perspective in that direction. Continue reading →

To their credit, the police in Windcrest, Texas, are considering alternatives to the way things have “always been done,” which has often been done wrong and too often with disastrous results. They are offering drivers an alternative to the usual traffic stop called the Trusted Driver program.

It’s a concept never done before, and it’s about to happen in Bexar County: Getting a traffic ticket sent to your phone without an officer pulling you over. One police department will be the first in the nation to test it.

“It’s not a 100% solution, but it’s a step forward in the right direction,” said Val Garcia, President & CEO of the Trusted Driver Program.

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I’m not religious. As a practical matter, I consider myself an “ethnic Jew,” mostly agnostic toward the religious side, I strongly believe in the separation of church and state, and am extremely wary of those who justify policy based on their belief system.

But at the same time, I am respectful of those who believe in their religion, not because I share their beliefs but because I recognize their right to their religious beliefs. And being a member of a religion shared by a small minority of Americans, it never bothered me that the religion of most Americans, Christianity, was treated differently, better, than mine. It was the only practical way to deal with it, as there didn’t seem to be much point to keeping school open on Christmas day when only a few of us would show up. Continue reading →