Few entrenched machines ran better than Chicago’s, or lasted as long. One of the dinosaurs of the Democratic cash machine was Alderman Ed Burke, who owned the 14th Ward. Somebody had to run it, so why not Burke?

Until this year, Burke’s 14th Ward organization was one of the only pure political machines in the country. The other is Madigan’s 13th Ward.

But the king of the 14th now faces 14 federal counts of corruption. Federal prosecutors earlier this year accused Burke of extorting the owners of a Burger King, allegedly withholding a remodeling permit in order to pressure them to hire his private law firm to handle their property tax appeals.

He’s under indictment, which is what he should be if there is evidence to support the allegations that he’s corrupt. Problem solved? Not for his wife. Continue reading →

The Los Angeles Times

It “got” it. Regardless of the hysteria, the lies, the emotions and the mindless outrage over the lenient Brock Turner sentence, the LA Times recognized that the legacy of Stanford non-lawyer lawprof Michelle Dauber’s war against Judge Aaron Persky would be to strike fear in the hearts of judges should they show more mercy than the mob would allow.

The problem is not what happened to Persky. The problem is how his recall will affect all the other California trial judges, some 1,500 of them, who now may be more likely to craft their sentencing decisions to take into account the degree to which an angry public wants the defendant punished.

Being California-centric, it focused only on its own judges. And indeed, the message was heard, loud and clear, throughout California. The idea of recall because a lawful sentence that fell short of the angry women’s demand for retribution would have seemed ridiculous before. That was no longer the case. #ThemToo. Continue reading →

I wrote a long post this morning about the New York Times “news analysis” of Deborah Ramirez’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh. I wrote it, but you won’t read it because after I was done, I decided not to publish it. I’ll explain.

The post was comprised of two parts, the first of which was about what’s wrong with trying decades-old accusations against the now-confirmed Kavanaugh, particularly using the weaselly language and guilt by innuendo reflected in the Times’ article, the worst sort of play to confirmation bias around.

But the more important part was where the young lawyers, the ones who inform me regularly that they’re far smarter and more aware than old lawyers who just don’t get it, would rather put their effort into rationalizing their woke outcomes than defending the core principles of criminal defense, public defense, against the conflation of “credible” allegations and guilt. Continue reading →

The Sackler family owned Purdue Pharma and made billions, which immediately marks them as evil in a world where fabulous wealth is prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. But there’s more beef to the claim than mere wealth.

Earlier this week, thousands of municipal governments and nearly two dozen states tentatively reached a settlement with the Sackler family and the company it owns, Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin.

The argument is that Purdue, and by extension the Sacklers, aggressively pushed oxy onto physicians, who prescribed it with reckless abandon, whose patients used it to excess, became addicted, had it in their medicine cabinets for their kids to steal, and produced an opioid epidemic. Or to put the argument in more realistic context, there’s an opioid crisis, people died and are dying, and someone must pay. Who better than the fabulously wealthy Sacklers who got the benefit of oxy? Continue reading →

The government asked for a month. The defense asked for probation. District of Massachusetts Judge Indira Talwani split the difference, imposing a sentence of 14 days incarceration (plus a $30,000 fine and 250 hours of community service, which nobody bothers to notice since only jail time seems to matter to outsiders) on Felicity Huffman.

Naturally, this “light” sentence, when a faithful application of 18 U.S.C. § 3553 would have been a slam dunk for probation, revealed the festering boil of hypocritical pus of the unduly passionate.

Felicity Huffman was just sentenced to 14 DAYS in jail for paying a $15K bribe so her daughter could get into a better college

Crystal Mason is serving a 5 YEAR sentence for trying to vote

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) September 13, 2019

And indeed, the government played the idiot’s game in its effort to make sure Huffman saw a cell. Continue reading →

Before the raid on Trump lawyer turned defendant turned snitch turned inmate, Michael Cohen, the idea of the feds raiding a law office to rifle through the files would offend the sensibilities of most rational people. But since Cohen was Trump’s lawyer, rational people were hard to find, and since Cohen turned out to be less than the poster boy for legal integrity and copped a plea, cries of impropriety rang hollow.

So now raiding law offices, particularly the law offices of real, actual, criminal defense lawyers is no big thing?

A prominent Baltimore defense lawyer has been accused of helping drug dealers commit and cover up crimes, and a second has been accused of obstructing justice on behalf of the first, who is a client, according to documents filed in a federal appeals court.

Neither Ken Ravenell, the first attorney, nor Joshua Treem, the second, has been charged with a crime.

Continue reading →

His application for coach of the Fremont Union High School Junior Varsity Tennis Team reflected an extremely well-qualified candidate.

The district said Persky, who used his legal name, Michael, when he applied, was a highly qualified candidate, having attended several tennis coaching clinics, adding that he holds a high rating from the US Tennis Association. In a statement, the district said he “successfully completed” the necessary hiring requirements and passed a fingerprint background check.

Why wouldn’t he pass a fingerprint background check? He was a judge, for crying out loud. But then they learned he was “that” Persky and the dots that only the unduly passionate can see were connected. Continue reading →

It’s become common for a tragedy to be immediately labeled an act of terrorism, usually based upon the deep reasoning, “how could this not be terrorism?” It’s become a word that expresses a depth of anger, of outrage, based upon motives, usually assumed at the point where the word gets pulled out, of someone committing an atrocity for the purpose of sending a message.

If it were thrown about with reckless abandon merely as a rhetorical ploy, or a catharsis because words like murder just don’t carry the gravitas needed anymore, that would be relatively silly but harmless. The problem is law enforcement has latched on to this phenomenon and now seeks to play the useful idiots for all their worth.

When detectives from the New York Police Department’s intelligence bureau arrested Jose Pimentel on Nov. 20, 2011, he was in a Washington Heights apartment putting the finishing touches on a pipe bomb he was building in an Al Qaeda-inspired plot to attack military and police targets in the city. On March 22, 2017, James Harris Jackson was arrested for the racially motivated sword killing of Timothy Caughman. Mr. Jackson, a white supremacist, said he had planned to kill more people of color in New York, hoping to start a race war. Continue reading →

For anyone who doesn’t know, my office on September 11, 2001, was on the 51st Floor of the Woolworth Building, which was the best possible view of the Twin Towers in New York City. It was from the spot where my desk chair sat that the photograph of The Site was taken for Life Magazine.

I was given a print of the photo, taken with a camera in large format showing exceptional detail. I still have it, squirreled away in a place where I never look. I won’t get rid of it, but I don’t look at it either. I’ve never watched a television show or documentary about 9/11. If it happens to come on, I change the channel. Continue reading →

No doubt Judge Richard Posner left the Seventh Circuit with the best of intentions.

“About six months ago,” Judge Posner said, “I awoke from a slumber of 35 years.” He had suddenly realized, he said, that people without lawyers are mistreated by the legal system, and he wanted to do something about it.

How he managed to sleep through this for 35 years remains something of a mystery, although it might be best explained less as slumber and more as not giving a damn and just being annoyed by the zany antics of pro se litigants, but two things appeared to coincide. First, he realized that there were meritorious issues buried deep in the gibberish of pro se applications, and second, he was bored with his life and wasn’t getting any younger.

His answer, after alienating himself from his colleagues on the circuit, was to form the Posner Center For Justice for Pro Se’s. It sure sounds all justice-y, and the mission tugged at our collective heartstrings. Continue reading →