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.

Patricia Stallings took her infant son Ryan to the hospital because of lethargy, vomiting and other symptoms. The hospital tested Ryan’s blood and found what it believed to be evidence of ethylene glycol and metabolic acidosis (his blood was too acidic). The key ingredient of antifreeze, ethylene glycol, produces low pH and can be fatal when it is ingested and metabolized into oxalate, which forms crystals with calcium ion in the brain and kidneys. Continue reading →

Seattle police detective, and former soldier, Christopher Young, begins by Gertruding to establish that he’s not just one of those bad cops and consequently easily dismissed.

As a progressive who wants to decriminalize drugs and advance the welfare state, I fit in well in my Pacific Northwest community. Except, that is, for my job: I’ve been a big-city cop here for 26 years. Before that, I served in the military. The raging #DefundthePolice movement doesn’t know me and my colleagues at all — and persistent myths about police and their critics do more harm than good.

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It was a 3-second Snapchat video made by a 15-year-old freshman who was excited to get her learner’s permit and sent privately to a friend. It would end up a catastrophe for Mimi Groves, but not by chance.

Ms. Groves had originally sent the video, in which she looked into the camera and said, “I can drive,” followed by the slur, to a friend on Snapchat in 2016, when she was a freshman and had just gotten her learner’s permit. It later circulated among some students at Heritage High School, which she and Mr. Galligan attended, but did not cause much of a stir.

Galligan was offended when he saw it. It wasn’t directed toward him, but it somehow wound its way around the school and ultimately onto his phone. Continue reading →

The Catch-22 of educating students who don’t show up when school is open and don’t sign on when it’s not is bad enough. Apologists offer the usual excuses, most of which have some element of truth in them but leave out the fact that if students and their parents wanted them to be educated, they would do everything in their power to make that happen. Yet, they don’t.

While the complaint/excuse cycle persists in New York City schools. the mayor has come up with a solution to address the “achievement gap.”

Some 700,000 of the city’s one million public school students are learning from home. The city is still working to convince teachers and parents that the schools are safe, a process that will continue well into next year — until vaccination is widespread. Many students, including homeless children, are still fighting just to gain reliable access to broadband internet service.

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Cops lie.

This is not a controversial assertion, because there is nobody, but nobody, who has a clue about criminal law who doesn’t know this to be true. But it’s also not sufficient to mean anything, because some lies are not only useful, but lawful, while others are not.

When cops take the witness stand to testify, they are as obliged to tell the “whole truth” as any other witness. They don’t, of course. At least not most of the time. It’s not that they lie about everything, although that happens, but they lie about little things, the normal gaps in their story that they either never knew, because they can be asked questions on cross that call for information that they took for granted, or they’ve forgotten the details they deem insignificant and so make them up on the stand. Continue reading →

Of all the odd voices to start such a fight, it was former Vox founder turned outcast Matt Yglesias.

I’m for a modest student debt forgiveness program (which I think is what Biden will do) but as you shift from “modest” to “total” debt forgiveness you are increasingly talking about helping dentists and lawyers rather than sympathetic cases.

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My Christmas tradition has been to post this video. This year, it’s an anachronism, as the pandemic precludes us from going to Chinese restaurants, meeting a group of friends and celebrating the day in our own way. But this too shall pass. Merry Christmas.

For some, the idea of showing mercy to the likes of Paul Manafort or Roger Stone is more than they can take. These are venal men who propped up an even more awful man, and for that they deserve nothing but hatred, pain and punishment. That they also committed crimes just proves it, but the truth is that they are not hated for the crimes they committed, but for their connection to Trump.

When Trump pardoned them, there was no question but that it was terrible. At the most superficial level, they were unworthy of mercy, receiving “crony pardons,” which is wrong as an abuse of power for personal reasons. Slightly deeper, it was a quid pro quo for keeping their mouth shut about Trump’s conduct, their loyalty to their patron, thus rewarding them for their role in corruption and concealing it. Continue reading →

Pandemic strikes earth. Women affected most?

As a result, some suggest that a year of Covid-19 may undo decades worth of progress toward gender equity in America, that even after the pandemic is brought under control, a generation of working mothers will never recover what they lost.

It makes you wonder: How meaningful was the progress we’ve made in the last three decades, if it can be undone so quickly and so ferociously?

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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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