There are bad, and I mean truly bad, things that happen. As Judge Kopf put it, sometimes bad things happen to good people, and it can’t be helped. But this could have been helped. It never should have happened. It never should have been possible. Yet it was and it did.

It was before dawn on Nov. 27, 2001, and Termaine Joseph Hicks was at the wrong place at precisely the wrong time.

A woman had been pistol-whipped, dragged into an alleyway behind what was then St. Agnes Hospital in South Philadelphia, and raped — until the rapist was startled and fled the scene. Hicks heard her screams and rushed to help. But, seconds later, police officers arrived, took him for the rapist and shot him three times. Hicks survived, but was charged with the rape and sentenced to 12½ to 25 years in prison. Continue reading →

It was more than ten years ago that Dr. SJ’s parents moved from New York to North Carolina, or “North Cacalacca” as her father called it. He wasn’t really on board with the move, and found the accents of his new neighbors somewhat odd. Among the many reasons he struggled with his new digs was that he was one of those guys who really loved New York. And one of the things he loved, and missed, was this shop in Queens that made chorizo. He could live without edible bagels, but what he really missed was that chorizo.

For Christmas, Dr. SJ decided to send her father a big bundle of chorizos. She made the trek to Queens and came home with a huge bag. After taking a few out for us, we packed the rest up in ice, inside this really cool bag designed to keep things cold. This went into a United States Postal Service Priority Mail box, together with a tin of holiday cookies Dr. SJ made from a recipe handed down by her grandmother to her, and her alone. Everyone else loved them, but nobody else made them. Continue reading →

For those of us with a passing interest in media accounts of crimes, reporting has long been a problem. Some journalists think they’re publicists for police departments, putting their press releases out there as gospel without the slightest interesting in questioning the facts, even when they’re absurd to the point of functional impossibility.

Other reporters have no clue what they’re writing about and spew nonsense. Still others persist in pushing nonsensical, if factually not inaccurate, information like the mandatory possible sentence available for a crime (“the defendant could be sentenced up to 1,999,999 years in prison”) even though it’s legally false. And still others write stories to promote an agenda, including allegations that are dubious and omitting facts that fail to conform to their preferred narrative. Continue reading →

Courts and bar disciplinary authorities have lines. Steal money from the escrow account and there’s a very good chance they’ll pull your ticket. But engage in frivolous litigation? Undermine faith in democracy in the process? On the one hand, judges are reluctant to chill challenges by putting the lawyers willing to take the chance of questioning widely accepted views at risk, as long as there is a good faith basis to argue for a change in law.

But that’s not what Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood were up to, and the City of Detroit wants sanctions.

The City of Detroit wants Sidney Powell and her self-styled “Kraken” team to face sanctions for “frivolously undermining ‘People’s faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government.’” Continue reading →

The Supreme Court denied certiorari in the Seventh Circuit case of Box v. Henderson, without opinion or dissent. The case involved a remarkably pointless effort by Indiana to make life more difficult and miserable for married lesbian couples with a child.

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill(R) took the position in Box v. Henderson that same-sex spouses should not have the same rights to be listed on state-issued birth certificates as opposite-sex spouses. The case arose as the result of several lesbian couples who conceived via artificial insemination; Indiana refused to list birth mothers’ wives on their children’s official birth certificates, but regularly listed birth mothers’ husbands on birth certificates without additional requirement. Continue reading →

Following the Supreme Court’s rejection of Texas’ attempt to sue a few of its sister states for not running elections in a way that might have produced the result it preferred, two things happened. One was that some, like me for example, noted that the Court was not the rigged, partisan tool of Darth Cheeto that Linda Greenhouse had written about for four brutally long years.

The other was the trivializing of the Court’s holding to law in the face of Trumpian pressure. Don’t praise the Court, was the cry of the passionate left, for doing the absolute least it could do, by upholding the law and refusing to bend to the whims of the crazy people. They’re still awful partisan hacks, even if they didn’t succumb this time. Continue reading →

How wonderful to see so many people argue so passionately about something so trivial! While our government’s computers have been hacked by the Russians, and the President of the United States has invoked the magic words, “THIS ELECTION IS UNDER PROTEST!”, the worst outrage du jour is that Northwestern’s Joseph Epstein wrote that the incoming First Lady should drop the doc.

Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the “Dr.” before your name? “Dr. Jill Biden ” sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title “Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.” A wise man once said that no one should call himself “Dr.” unless he has delivered a child. Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith drop the doc.

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Are Lindsey Boylan’s accuations true? Beats me, although they’re credible in the sense that they certainly could be true. She alleges that New York Governor Andy Cuomo sexually harassed her. Boylan, who is now running for Manhattan Borough President, was an aide at the time, deputy secretary for economic development and as a special adviser to the governor. That makes it possible that Cuomo behaved as she says.

“I could never anticipate what to expect: would I be grilled on my work (which was very good) or harassed about my looks,” Lindsey Boylan, the former aide, wrote on Twitter. “Or would it be both in the same conversation?”

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I watch Netflix. But then, when I watch their dramatizations, and enjoy them as I do, I realize one thing. They’re not real. They’re not documentaries. They’re entertainment. They’re shows written by screenwriters whose dialogue is made up, played by actors who know nothing about their characters, presenting stories that reflect whatever the producers and directors want them to present. They can be great TV, but they’re still just entertainment.

Not everybody gets this.

Before “Making a Murderer” aired, a Google search of his name “would have revealed two nondescript news articles about routine local crime,” he alleges in a lawsuit. Now it turns up hundreds of thousands. He and his family have received violent threats that “fill the capacity of 28 compact discs,” the lawsuit claims. (Mr. Colborn, who retired in 2018, declined an interview request.)

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Trump supporters rallied in Freedom Plaza as Marine One flew overhead, people in the crowd waving at their president and believing. They’re allowed to believe, just as Trump is allowed to enjoy the adoration of his most devoted supporters in his waning lame duck days. It’s not as if he would let any of them into Mar-a-Lago when he’s gone.

But true believers, for whom all the bluff of election fraud claims remains disconnected to all the courts, all the judges, all the Trump-appointed judges, who have rejected them, weren’t the only ones to step out for Trump. There was also a group of pathetic losers who call themselves Proud Boys, because losers always pick a name to make themselves feel better about being losers. Continue reading →