Imagine you’re in the parking lot of Los Pollos Hermanos after a chicken dinner that couldn’t be beat, and spot an odd looking box attached to your car. You’re reasonably familiar with your car, and know that it didn’t come with any such box. You move closer, take a harder look, and have no clue how or why that box is attached to your car. So you grab it, pull it off, and put it in the barn. Did you steal it?

Law enforcement secured a warrant to plant a small, inconspicuous GPS tracking device on Derek Heuring’s Ford Expedition. The device gave officers regular location readings for about a week—until it abruptly stopped providing updates. Over the next ten days, the officers could not determine what happened. But then, after discovering that the tracker was no longer attached to Heuring’s car, an officer obtained warrants to search Heuring’s home and his father’s barn for evidence of the device’s theft.

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A story, an op-ed attached, came across my radar and I clicked because it looked interesting. And a screen popped up: You’ve reached your limit of free stories. You can subscribe for a mere (whatever). So I tried again, this time in incognito mode which often skirts the problem. Same screen, noting that I was in incognito mode and they were not going to let me beat their system. Fair enough.

I completely understand the need for a publication to make money. They have expenses. I get it. Oh boy, do I get it. But at the same time, they want and need eyeballs, without which they cease to exist. And they’re not shy about asking people like me to send eyeballs their way. I get emails, press releases, pitches all the time from a surprisingly wide variety of publications, seeking to entice me to write about them and thereby send them new eyeballs. Most of the pitches aren’t right for me, but that’s the nature of the beast. Continue reading →

As of this writing, the jury has been out for three days. But today is Friday, and Fridays are magic in jury rooms, so you never know. But for the outside world, the verdict came in on Day 1: Guilty. Even people who know better, like Conor Friedersdorf, took for granted that Harvey Weinstein was guilty when he interviewed me for The Atlantic.

Friedersdorf: Let’s turn from the innocent to the guilty. I’ve wondered what effect #MeToo will have on them. Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein are no longer able to marshal their wealth to transgress with impunity against women after woman. To me, that’s progress, and I celebrate the careful journalism that documented their misdeeds and prompted criminal probes.

Greenfield: And then there’s the poster boy for #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, who has already had the charges based on one accuser dismissed because it was revealed that her allegations were false in that she knowingly engaged in sex to get a role, fully aware of the deal she made with the devil. Other charges have other issues. As he’s yet to be convicted of anything, let’s not assume the verdict by the Court of Ronan Farrow is inviolate.

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When he told me, I was shocked and deeply saddened. He told me that it wasn’t a secret, on the one hand, but it wasn’t the sort of personal news he wanted to broadcast, and so I accepted his decision and, aside from expressing my wishes directly to him, kept my yap shut. This was his life and his choice whether to announce it, not mine. But now, Jeff Gamso has done two things. He’s written his first blawg post in a while and, in it, he went public.

A bit over two months ago, I was taken to the emergency room.  I had nearly collapsed in the kitchen of a church where I was chopping ham, helping folks from a church in a richer parish prepare a free meal for the area’s residents.  The consensus was that I should go to the emergency room. Continue reading →

On the one hand, Harvard prawf Cass Sunstein often raises interesting questions. On the other, his answers aren’t always as interesting. He’s done it again in an op-ed arguing that it might be time for the Attorney General to be independent of the President.

In view of the intensifying controversy over the politicization of the Department of Justice under Attorney General William Barr and its potential weaponization at the hands of President Trump, it is worth reviving a proposal that has not been seriously discussed since the Watergate era: Congress should transform the Justice Department into an independent agency, legally immunized from the president’s day-to-day control.

Yep, the syllogism is BACK!!!* Continue reading →

Trying to explain how something, viewed in retrospect from another time and place, happened is too often a fool’s errand. Nonetheless, retired federal Judge Shira Scheindlin gives it a go, and she comes with the cred of having been the judge in Floyd v. City of New York, holding unconstitutional the NYPD policy of stop & frisk, not to be confused with the otherwise constitutional authority to conduct a Terry stop which shared the same words,

In 2013, I ruled in Floyd vs. City of New York that the tactics underlying the city’s stop-and-frisk program violated the constitutional rights of people of color. While Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York, black and Latino people were disproportionately stopped, and often frisked, millions of times, peaking at 690,000 in 2011. After my ruling, the number of stops plummeted to 11,000 in 2018. And crime did not rise.

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Having already told the tale of civil asset forfeiture from back in the bad old days, when it was only going to be used against drug kingpins to “take the profit out of crime,” and even if people didn’t adore it (they did), they didn’t oppose it, there’s a certain amusement to the retelling of Randy Sowers’ travails.

Strapped with pistols and carrying government IDs, two Treasury agents walked onto a Maryland farm on a cold winter morning in 2012, and asked for the owner – Randy Sowers. It was a blur of badges and questions, but Sowers’ four-year legal nightmare was only just beginning. “My story could belong to any farmer or business owner,” Sowers says. “People have almost no idea what the feds will do when they want to hurt you. What kind of power-hungry bureaucrats do we have when guilt or innocence plays no role in the system?”

No, there is nothing funny about what happened to Sowers. What is funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, is his belief that “people have almost no idea what the feds will do when they want to hurt you.” On the contrary, “people” know exactly what they’ll do. Maybe Sowers didn’t. Maybe the people Sowers knows didn’t. Maybe the nice folks at AgWeb didn’t. But “people” did. Continue reading →

There are a few people who tell stories of the travesty of the criminal law system for the benefit of the cause, their self-aggrandizement and the validation of “likes” from their useful idiots. The problem is their stories aren’t truthful, not so much in the sense that they’re telling lies, although that happens, but in what they’re leaving out. Deception happens by omission as well as commission.

To make matters worse, the group of liars is growing. Seeing the effectiveness of telling only so much of the tale as serves their cause to pander to the intellectually stunted, or drawing bizarrely macrocosmic lessons from small anecdotes, has been broadening out to people beyond the ranks of the activists who seek to achieve their goals by any means necessary. Once smart, thoughtful and, at least as far as I know, honest people have chosen pandering for likes over maintaining their integrity. Live and learn. Continue reading →

In the aftermath of the L’affaire Kozinski, a group of former law clerks took to the microphone to call for the judiciary to protect Harvard Law School’s finest from sexual harassment. Notably, the testimony was before a committee formed at the behest of the Chief Justice of the United States and comprised of judges. Recommendations followed, announced by no less adored a jurist than the benighted Merrick Garland.

And then came the zombie testimony of Olivia Warren, except she spoke not to the judiciary, but about the judiciary and the inadequacy of its newly created procedures for victims of judicial impropriety to feel entirely safe and comfortable. It was unclear from her complaint that the system didn’t, or wouldn’t, work to protect her from the ravages of Judge Stephen Reinhardt, but that the system wasn’t her safe space. Continue reading →

It seemed like a silly response, from the perspective of actually accomplishing anything, that a thousand, now over two thousand, “alumni of the United States Department of Justice” called for the resignation of  Attorney General Bill Barr, and condemned his sticking his nose into, and overruling, the position taken by the four assigned prosecutors in the Roger Stone prosecution. But even though it wouldn’t force Barr to resign, how else could they register their outrage at this flagrant politicization of their former office, and best brand marketing machine?

Put aside the secondary rationalization that the Guidelines Sentence against Stone was ridiculously harsh, because there’s no serious belief that the AG was motivated by his inner angel of fairness and proportionality, even if that would be nice. This was a crony move, and that made it dirty even if it wasn’t otherwise wrong. Continue reading →