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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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 →