Gertrude Warning: I’m vaxxed and boosted, and think everyone should be. What follows has nothing to do with whether getting vaccinated is a good thing or not, but whether New York City’s lame duck mayor, Bill de Blasio, can do what he just did.

New York City unveiled plans on Monday to require on-site employees at all private businesses, from bodegas to multinational banks, to get vaccinated — the most sweeping local mandate in the country and one that is intended to limit the spread of the new coronavirus variant this winter.

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The argument is a good one, a real one, about the Catch-22 of getting parole. If there’s one thing every prisoner doing a long sentence in a New York State prison knows, he will not get parole if he does not admit guilt. David Leonhardt uses the story of 78-year-old Joseph Gordon, who was sentenced to 25 to life for murder.

Joseph Gordon, a 78-year-old man in New York State, falls into the second category. He has already served more than his minimum sentence of 25 years for a 1991 murder, and multiple prison officials and guards have supported his parole application. Gordon has “the character and moral compass to return to society as a productive member of his community,” wrote a former superintendent at Fishkill Correctional Facility, where Gordon is incarcerated. Continue reading →

On rare occasion, outsiders get a glimpse into the inner turmoil of a cult. Mark Bennett, the Texas Tornado, provides such a rare occasion as his pal, Daphne Silverman, took on the undoing of the representation of Ruby Montoya by National Lawyers Guild member and Civil Liberties Defense Center Executive Director Lauren Regan, who, it’s argued, was a movement lawyer who coerced Montoya to plead guilty to “a string of arson and sabotage attacks against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in 2017.”

Bennett provides a deep dive into the background of the representation, the inherent conflicts raised and now the attempt to oust Silverman, also a National Lawyers Guild member, for putting her client before the movement. As Bennett spells it out as the Criminal-Defense Principle. Continue reading →

It might not be too great a stretch to say that James and Jennifer Crumbley, parents of  Oxford High School shooter, Ethan, aren’t going to win any prizes for parents of the year, but their charges for involuntary manslaughter raise very serious concerns. The allegations against them are disturbing.

Michigan prosecutors on Friday charged the couple with involuntary manslaughter for buying their son the weapon as a Christmas gift and ignoring warning signs as late as the day of the shooting. They said Jennifer Crumbley wrote in a text message to her son, “LOL, I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught,” after a teacher saw him searching for ammunition on his phone during class. Continue reading →

Let’s be clear up front. The Code of Professional Responsibility, or whatever it’s called in your jurisdiction, is a minimal floor of ethical responsibility for the legal profession. It’s not very demanding. It doesn’t ask much of us. It barely scratches the surface of actual ethics, and it takes so little to comply. So expecting lawyers who happen to work for a governmental entity and call themselves prosecutors to adhere to it really isn’t much to ask.

Yet, as the New York Times editorial says, they’re treated as if they’re untouchable.

Prosecutors are among the most powerful players in the criminal justice system. They can send a defendant off to years in prison, or even to death row. Most wield this power honorably. Yet, when prosecutors don’t, they rarely pay a price, even for repeated and egregious misconduct that puts innocent people behind bars.

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It’s cool. It’s hip. It’s happening. Even @Jack did it. So what could go wrong?

For Gabby Ianniello, it was the blisters from putting on stilettos every morning for her real estate job, which had called employees back to the office last fall. For Giovanna Gonzalez, it was those three little letters, R.T.O., coming from her investment management boss. For Tiffany Knighten, it was finding out that a teammate’s annual salary was over $10,000 higher than hers for a role at her level.

They were fed up. They were ready to resign. And they wanted their TikTok followers to know.

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Among the tactics used to investigate a crime, one of the easiest and most useful is “knock and talk,” where agents without a warrant go to the home of a suspect, knock on the door and see what comes of it. Since they need no warrant to knock on a door like anyone else, it suffers from neither the need to show probable cause and the effort to prepare papers, nor judicial review. And people being people, it’s remarkably effective because people just can’t  manage to just say “no.”

As part of an investigation named “Operation Dark Room,” federal agents discovered financial ties between Meyer and individuals in the Philippines who were livestreaming sex acts involving children. To gather more information, two agents decided to visit Meyer at his home and knock on his door. During the course of the conversation, which took place in the agents’ car, Meyer revealed a number of facts that aroused suspicion, including that he had personal and financial ties to the individuals involved in the abuse. When he further admitted that he used a computer and cellphone to contact them, the agents asked if he would be willing to turn those devices over for an examination.

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There are better criminal defense lawyers and worse criminal defense lawyers. There are lawyers who care and lawyers who don’t. There are lawyers who have the time and lawyers who are too busy to be able to do what needs to be done. There are incompetent lawyers. Most don’t know, or won’t admit, they suck at law. Many will fight to their last breath to argue they don’t. If only they would put that level of energy into fighting for their clients.

You can’t discuss this problem without inviting outrage from whatever interest group gets poked. And to be fair, there are incompetent lawyers across the board, from retained counsel to indigent defense to public defenders. Sometimes it’s due to circumstances, lack of time or money, carrying too high a caseload or getting too little compensation to pay for the time and resources needed. Continue reading →

My wife came home yesterday and told me that the guy on the radio said the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. I calmly told her they didn’t reverse anything, but held oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. She was unconvinced, so we turned on the news. It was a bit fuzzier, but made the clear point that it wasn’t “if,” but “how” the Supreme Court would reverse Roe. She gave me that face, the one that says “so everybody else is wrong and you’re right?”

I get that face a lot. Continue reading →

As I’ve made clear in the past, I don’t use it. Not because I can’t. My mouth can form the word. Not even because my buddy Elie tells me I’m never allowed to. Elie’s got a lot of rules like that. It’s simply a matter of choice, and I choose not to. But that doesn’t mean others can’t, including University of Rochester Prof David Bleich or Harvard Law Prof Randall Kennedy, who made it really hard to avoid given the title of his book,

Bleich teaches, of all things, about race and gender, and in the course of his instruction, he read from Kennedy’s writings. Verbatim.

This semester, Professor Bleich is teaching a class on Gender and Anger. He read aloud from a short story that had been assigned to the class. The portion of the text he read included the n-word. Students objected, and there was a vigorous conversation about the use of the word. In a subsequent class, Professor Bleich read to the students a section of Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy‘s Chronicle of Higher Education article on the use of the n-word in classroom settings.

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