There are some very popular people on social media, with tens of thousand of followers, gushing about the injustice of the system. Much as their assertions tend to be half-baked, quasi-accurate by including only the details that further their posture and omitting entirely the requisite facts that expose the claims of heartbreak as manipulative hogwash, the audience is non-lawyers.

They twit for the benefit of the unduly passionate, to convince them that the system is horrible and broken, that District Attorneys other than the tiny subset of progressives they adore are evil, that cops are just racist killing machines and that they are the heroes who sacrifice to save society by fighting the good fight, mostly at night arraignments and occasionally in post-conviction exoneration cases.

So what, you might ask? If it’s just petty deception of the useful idiots to create a critical mass for reform, isn’t it worth it? Perhaps, subject to one’s tolerance for lying, but the problem is that it’s not just the unwashed masses, but a lot of law students and baby lawyers (and more than a few lawyers with sufficient experience to know better) seem to have gotten caught up in the fervor. Continue reading →

Even a faux-feminist show pony needs to earn a living, you know. Nobody paid Lisa Bloom to talk to the microphones about the pain and suffering of sad victims, even though that was her brand.

Stop giggling. When Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey included the $895 per hour in their book, “She Said,” it was to inflame the masses with her outrageous fee, even though it’s second tier, teetering on third, for good lawyers. But that was the problem for Lisa Bloom. She was a pseudo-celebrity lawyer, much like her mom, Gloria Allred, but that didn’t pay the bills. Guys like Harvey Weinstein paid the bills. At least that’s what Bloom thought. Continue reading →

Not that Walter Mosley needs anyone’s help to tell a story, but a commenter, Patti Jacobs from San Diego, was too perfect to pass up. Let’s assume she’s female, because in a sane world her name would be a giveaway, and she’s likely white because I assume she would have said she wasn’t if she wasn’t. Regardless, Patti Jacobs put the cherry on top:

The dialogue has already been opened, and the change has already taken place. The n-word is offensive at all times, by all speakers.

Says who? Says Patti Jacobs, the person who gets to tell you, and Walter Mosley, what can and cannot be said. All words. All speakers. It’s unclear what Patti Jacobs’ day job is, but it wouldn’t be surprising to learn she works in HR, keeping the work world safe from discomfort. Continue reading →

Why? Why would a defendant rat out his “accomplice” to the cops or prosecutors? A few general reasons come quickly to mind: First, sometimes it just happens, when a suspect is being interrogated and the name just comes out. Second, there’s misdirected anger, when a defendant gets nailed for something and believes it’s unfair that he has to go down but the other guy is going to get away with it. Why him? Why should he take the fall?

Third, because a defendant comes to the realization that he’s not going to walk and sees opportunity. Whether it’s the chance to snitch and get credit that will serve to reduce his sentence or there’s some hated person, and this is a chance for revenge. It may even serve to accomplish both purposes, a sentence reduction and vengeance. As long as the defendant is going down anyway, why not make the most of it?

There is only one hurdle to making this work, the accomplice corroboration rule, which “requires that accomplice testimony be independently verified to sustain a conviction.” It’s not much. Any independent corroboration will do, no matter how slight. Continue reading →

When my son and I met with the dean of admissions at my alma mater, he could not have been more accommodating. My son didn’t want to go, but I tricked him because they were holding the Cornell Open fencing competition that weekend and it made the perfect lure. He won, despite only being in high school, and they wanted him to fence for Cornell.* Plus, he was a direct legacy.

Of course, my son didn’t care. He didn’t want to go there, no matter how sweet the dean’s endearments. And he didn’t need my legacy bump to get where he wanted to go.

In a 2012 blog post, Chris Peterson, an assistant director in the M.I.T. admissions office, put the issue in stark terms. “I personally would not work for a college which had legacy admission because I am not interested in simply reproducing a multigenerational lineage of educated elite. And if anyone in our office ever advocated for a mediocre applicant on the basis of their ‘excellent pedigree’ they would be kicked out of the committee room. So to be clear: if you got into M.I.T., it’s because you got into M.I.T. Simple as that.”

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Joi Ito was about as odd and quirky a choice for director of the MIT Media Lab as imaginable. He had no college degree, yet held a professor’s rank at the Institute and was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. His background was like a shotgun blast, with buckshot spread everywhere. And yet, he was director of MIT’s flagship program in innovation.

Then came Jeffrey Epstein, who turned out to be a significant donor to the program, even as no one is entirely clear where Epstein’s money came from. But Ito knew one place it might go, and that was his lab and his personal enterprises. Part of the job is to get donations, and Epstein was one of Ito’s “go-to” guys. Was it wrong to take his money?

I’m writing about Ito, not because I think he ever participated in the heinous acts Epstein was accused of, but because his willful ignorance of Epstein’s record contributed to the harm of the victims. A well-written New Yorker article by Amy Davidson Sorkin details how much of Epstein’s power lay in his powerful network of men, many of whom were in academia. Another article, by Philip Weiss in 2007, says that when asked about his child prostitution charges, Epstein responded, “Have you managed to talk to many of my friends? … Do you understand what an extraordinary group of people they are, what they have accomplished in their fields?”

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Thought you heard the end of “I know you are but what am I” when you were on the playground in third grade? No, of course you didn’t, because you are no doubt following the smartest and most persuasive people your tribe has to offer, and they’re hurling variations of this infantile reply fast and furious.

Breitbart, that bastion on deep alt-right thought, dug up some old twits from a University of Alabama Dean of Students.

Jamie Riley had dared to criticize the American flag and the police, writing in 2017 that they represent “a systemic history of racism for my people.”

Breitbart decided that this and other tweets of Riley’s merited an article. Reporter Kyle Morris wrote that “a series of resurfaced tweets from Dr. Jamie R. Riley, the University of Alabama’s assistant vice president and dean of students, show he once believed the American flag and police in America are racist.” But the tweets didn’t just resurface on their own—they were publicized by the right-wing news site in order to send a social media mob after Riley.

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While Theresa Brown’s “inside nursing” op-ed might be seen as limited to the sphere of hospitals, it’s not.

The nurses were hiding drugs above a ceiling tile in the hospital — not because they were secreting away narcotics, but because the hospital pharmacy was slow, and they didn’t want patients to have to wait. I first heard about it from Karen Feinstein, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, who reported it at a board meeting several years ago. I wasn’t surprised: Hiding common medications is a workaround, an example of circumventing onerous rules to make sure patients get even basic care.

Workarounds are legion in the American health care system, to the extent that ECRI (formerly the Emergency Care Research Institute) listed them fourth among its list of top 10 patient safety concerns for health care organizations in 2018. Workarounds, the group writes, are an adaptive response — or perhaps one should say maladaptive response — to “a real or perceived barrier or system flaw.”

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News out of Boston was deeply disconcerting. The progressive district attorney, Rachael Rollings, had decided against prosecuting “counter-protesters” at the ridiculous Straight Pride Parade. The reports showed that Judge Richard Sinnott refused to dismiss the cases.

Even more outrageous, an attorney representing one of the defendants, was held in contempt and taken into custody.

Susan Church, a prominent Cambridge-based immigration lawyer, was in court to represent at least one client who was arrested by Boston police during the controversial so-called “Straight Pride” parade and counter-protests on Saturday. Continue reading →

During my brief but wonderful tenure as the mean-ass editor of Fault Lines, I had a minor epiphany. The concept of FL was to bring together the differing points of view of the players (what might be called “stakeholders” in the moment’s jargon) in the criminal legal system. Defense, prosecution, cops and judges all had their say.

I read every post before it hit the screen, and that’s when it happened. Rather than finding myself seduced by confirmation bias, I found just the opposite. It was far easier for me to be critical of posts arguing the defense perspective than the prosecutorial perspective. By critical, I mean that I could easily see the logical gaps, the legal holes, the facile inferential leaps that allowed arguments with which I agreed to reach their conclusions without facing the hard questions.

But the prosecutor posts? Being a criminal defense lawyer, I was often in natural disagreement with the perspective from the outset, finding myself inclined to argue the merit of the perspective rather than pinpointing particular problems in reaching the conclusion. What I found was that I had to resist the urge to disagree with posts I disagreed with, and in doing so, I was substantially less critical of the reasoning used to reach the conclusion. Continue reading →