The problem starts with reliability. When we’re given the official stats on police killings, we assume them to be accurate. After all, it’s not as if each of us, individually, can run around and investigate each death, and why would they lie, always the question for which no good answer exists. And yet, it happens, maybe not so much lies as in deliberate falsehoods, but less than full and accurate information.

Researchers say they’ve done the digging, plus some statistical extrapolation, and come to the realization that deaths at the hand of police have been under-reported. No, under-reported fails to capture the scope of what’s wrong here. The numbers are twice as bad as previously believed. Continue reading →

Marriage is hard. It takes work and dedication. And sometimes, it fails no matter how hard you try or how much you’re willing to tolerate to make it work. And then there’s being married to a criminal defense lawyer, which adds an extra layer of difficulty given that the beast is likely to have an inherent conflict; the responsibility to clients isn’t something that takes time off when it’s inconvenient, whether because someone has to cook dinner or clean the bathroom.

So when the criminal defense lawyer isn’t the husband, but the wife, is it even doable anymore? Lara Bazelon found out the hard way. Continue reading →

The request sent to UCLA Anderson School of Management accounting lecturer Gordon Klein turned out to be a form email, one that was prepared by activist students to be sent to all instructors, and one that was intended as a prelude to either appreciation, if they acquiesced or destruction if they didn’t. Gordon Klein didn’t.

The request (which was not available at the time of the original post about Klein but is set forth here at paragraph 26) was to cut black students a break on their grades because of the trauma of the times. After Klein failed to acquiesce to the “no harm” request, and despite a conciliatory reply from the student who sent him the email, his reply went viral and the dean went public about it. Continue reading →

I remember when German Lopez first began writing on criminal law issues at Vox. His posts were both progressive and shallow, reflecting that superficial gloss that people longer on passion than knowledge tend to embrace with the certainty of the righteous. He’s come a long way since then, suffering the slings and arrows of the left for his acceptance of facts even when they fail to push the preferred narrative.

This might not seem particularly brave, but for someone who leans left, enjoyed the camaraderie of the woke and works at Vox, it was damn near begging to be cast as a traitor to the cause. As has become abundantly clear, the gravest enemies of progressives aren’t conservatives, Republicans or white supremacists, but liberals who offer a more viable, realistic, free and less hateful path toward achieving many of the same goals. Authoritarians hate the competition. Continue reading →

When I wrote about the ACLU’s attempt to twist the meaning of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s words, I avoided addressing the elephant in the quote. It has since become a “big deal,” forcing ACLU’s reimaginative executive director Anthony Romero to apologize.

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Monday that he regretted that a tweet sent out recently by his organization altered the words of a well-known quote by the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“We won’t be altering people’s quotes,” Mr. Romero said in an interview on Monday evening. “It was a mistake among the digital team. Changing quotes is not something we ever did.”

Continue reading →

Decades ago, there was a push to eliminate all discretion by police in making domestic violence arrests. If a woman accused a man, the man was arrested, regardless of whether the evidence supported the accusation. The argument for it was that cops didn’t take domestic violence seriously. The joke was that it was because they were often its perpetrators, and it wasn’t a very funny joke. But the flip side became a tool that was abused, with women using it to exact revenge on men for ulterior reasons, to deflect their own culpability as the abuser to their victim, which was often the case though rarely said aloud.

Like most efforts to overcome one perceived problem, it created others. The notion was that the only way to overcome police failure to take domestic violence seriously was to remove their discretion. That meant the innocent men, or male victims, were burned in the process. It was a price activists were willing, if not happy, to pay. Continue reading →

Peak? Quintessential? Bizarre and idiotic excess? The blazing speed with which it all happened was shocking in itself, but even as lines are drawn, sides are picked, tempers flare, the questions raised are already ripe for consideration. It began with one guy, a black author with a significant following on social media, putting his indictment, with fuzzy video, on twitter to evoke a reaction.

https://twitter.com/FredTJoseph/status/1441919836112650242

Continue reading →

There are many cockamamie notions whirling around the damp minds of criminal law reformers which wind up with legal academics grasping at straws to write some hip, radical  article or book to promote a means of fixing the broken, invariably racist, system. Some, like jury nullification or eliminating plea bargaining, have gained traction.

A nascent notion came from the fertile imagination of a Stanford sociologist, with a courtesy appointment at Stanford Law School, Matthew Clair, who wrote a book that was excerpted at Inquest, which bills itself as “The Decareral Brainstorm.” Such sites, dedicated to such one-sided causes without a discouraging word, have a tendency to promote ridiculous ideas because there’s no one around to point out that they’re, well, ridiculous. And Clair’s idea is not merely ridiculous, but dangerous. Continue reading →

It “occurred” to me when it was rubbed in my face that the posts here are only one piece of the SJ puzzle. There are a bunch of people who keep this hotel open, from the friends who fix the program when it goes awry to those of you who help pay the freight of keeping a website on the ‘net.

There’s my editor, Beth, without whom I would look far stupider than I do otherwise, and the bouncers in the hotel bar, Skink and Sgt. Schultz. And there are the voices of reason who talk me off the edge (thanks, Judge Kopf) and the voices of unreason who drive me toward it (I’m looking at you, Barleycorn). And then there are the SJ cultural muses, Howl and Guitar Dave, whose music video selections have become as integral to my doing this gig as the catharsis of writing posts in the wee hours of the morning. Continue reading →

It was a bold idea, one that might well have bridged the gap between the high cost of legal representation and the inability of many to pay the price for the banal requirements of legal advice and assistance to perform so many common tasks. And yet, Washington State’s attempt to make Limited Licence Legal Technicians, or 3LTs as I called them, a thing died.

The reasons are somewhat speculative, as there is no empirical study explaining the problem and the rationalizations are driven by political agendas, those determined to create a lesser tier of legal representation to provide “Access to Justice” (A2J) blaming external causes rather than an inherent failure of the plan. Continue reading →