There are big issues, huge issues, that demand redress for defendants to get a fair trial. The portraits on the wall aren’t one of them.

A Fairfax County judge has ruled that a Black defendant can’t get a fair trial in a courtroom decorated overwhelmingly with portraits of White judges and has ordered the paintings to be removed for the man’s upcoming legal proceeding.

Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge David Bernhard wrote in an opinion issued late Monday that the portraits of past judges from the Fairfax County Circuit Court could create the impression that the court is biased. Bernhard wrote that he won’t allow any portraits to be on display for any trial he presides over.

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That didn’t take long, even if it wasn’t from the expected direction. After questioning whether the systemic reforms announced by the new Los Angeles district attorney, George Gascón, were sustainable, answers swiftly emerged.

LGBTQ voters and others were dumbstruck last week when Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced that, in addition to several other sweeping reforms, he’d be ending sentencing enhancements for criminals, including those found to have committed hate crimes. Continue reading →

Trump may have demanded the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as part of the defense spending bill, but that was just Trump being self-serving Trump, his twits labeled as false and his ridiculous claims being rejected for being ridiculous. Not that progressives disagree, except that they want Section 230 repealed so they can dictate their own flavor of censorship. Bipartisanship at its best, everybody wants to control people’s speech.

But while the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private entities, and Section 230 enables those entities to both publish and moderate as they see fit, there is an unpleasant fact that remains: the normal channels of communication, newspapers, broadcast television and radio, have been supplanted by social media and search engines. No, Zuck isn’t a government official. Yes, Zuck has a lot to say about what others get to say. No, we don’t want or trust government to decide what ideas are permissible. But let’s be real. Do you trust Facebook, Google or Twitter to decide either? Continue reading →

There are  two problems with a post derived from an article in the Washington Post (sorry, Radley), where democracy dies in the darkness. The first is that WaPo has done as much as possible to force readers to pay because Bezos’ baby needs new shoes. The paywall can be circumvented, but it’s a pain.

So linking to a WaPo story here puts you, dear readers, in the unpleasant position of either paying for it, not reading the underlying story or having to go through the rigors of climbing over the paywall. For this I apologize. Continue reading →

There’s a difference between being smart, which I’ll define as having a broad range of knowledge and the capacity for rational thought, and intelligent in a particular subject, such as the person who is a brilliant physicist but can’t figure out how to change a tire. Both of them might have a college diploma, even a graduate degree or more, because smart people are more likely to obtain degrees.

It’s not the degree that makes them smart, although it might reflect their being better educated in a particular subject because they’ve studied it in depth. One of the constant arguments about lawyers is that a lot of us aren’t all that bright, which is true, though most of us have a functional knowledge of how law works. This is sufficiently specialized knowledge to distinguish lawyers from non-lawyers when it comes to legal matters. It’s not that non-lawyers aren’t just as smart, if not smarter, than lawyers, but they lack the foundation necessary to understand law. And since Congress does law, that knowledge can come in handy. Continue reading →

Understand that I am against the death penalty for a variety of reasons, none of which is to say that there aren’t bad people out there who are undeserving of sympathy. And, based upon my anecdotal experience, there are a lot more of them than most people realize. Still, Lisa Montgomery’s actions reached the level of reprehensibility that would, at least arguably, put her among the “worst of the worst.”

On Dec. 16, 2004, Ms. Montgomery drove to Skidmore, Mo., where she strangled a pregnant woman named Bobbie Jo Stinnett, then sliced open her belly and took the baby to the home she shared with her husband, Kevin, in Kansas. The baby survived.

Not exactly the sort of crime that can be chalked up to the usual warm and fuzzy “blame society” excuses. Or is it? Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

There are times when police officers overstep when using deadly force, and times when they do not—and body cameras have proved essential in determining the facts in those cases. On April 22, 2020, Daniel Hernandez caused a five-car accident in Los Angeles, and, according to a 911 call, was cutting himself with a knife. Continue reading →

I asked my son what he did last night, and he told me he had a “zoom date.”

“A what?” A “zoom date,” where he and a woman swiped in the same direction on some app, if that’s how it works, and they then have a “date.” On Zoom. Where they sit in their own homes and stare at a screen and attempt to make a connection. There was no shared food, no beverage, no smell, no taste and no feel. It sounded awful. No, it sounded ridiculously sanitary, as if no two human beings could possibly believe this was a good idea. Yet, this is the time of COVID, so real dates couldn’t happen and virtual was all they had left. Continue reading →

Who gets the COVID-19 vaccine before someone else is both an easy and difficult question. The first group on line are uncontroversial, healthcare workers in the trenches trying to save the lives of those suffering. But things quickly get fuzzy after that.

While federal officials have issued broad recommendations about who should be first in line—healthcare workers and residents of long-term facilities—individual states will be making the final decision of how to distribute the limited number of vaccines. At least 19 will consider measures of inequality, including poverty and race, in order to reach those who are worse off, according to a review of state plans filed with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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It’s been coming for a while. It’s why “Karen” happened, the white woman acting upon her fear, when that fear happens to involve a black person. Maybe the woman is wrong to be afraid, but maybe she’s not. After all, the narrative says that she is allowed to be afraid, for good reason or whatever reason, since women are historically oppressed, except when she’s afraid of someone whose identity trumps hers. It’s all so confusing, which explains why feminist scholar Susan Estrich gets it all so very, very wrong.

Having been run out of San Francisco, as liberal a place as you will find in America, George Gascon relocated to Los Angeles. Having failed to free everyone from prison in San Francisco, he is now trying to do even worse in Southern California.

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