Within the Department of Justice is a group of lawyers doing the lawyering for the Executive Branch of government. It reputedly has the best and brightest lawyers the DoJ has to offer, which would make sense since it’s lawyering for lawyers. It’s called the Office of Legal Counsel, and it’s putative mission is to be the legal adviser to a branch of government, including the president.

[T]he Office of Legal Counsel provides legal advice to the President and all executive branch agencies.  The Office drafts legal opinions of the Attorney General and provides its own written opinions and other advice in response to requests from the Counsel to the President, the various agencies of the Executive Branch, and other components of the Department of Justice.  Such requests typically deal with legal issues of particular complexity and importance or those about which two or more agencies are in disagreement.  The Office is also responsible for reviewing and commenting on the constitutionality of pending legislation.

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There are two things that invariably happen simultaneously when the wrong person is arrested. An innocent person gets burned and a guilty person remains free to do more harm. Even if one isn’t important enough to get the cops and prosecution off its butt to figure out whether it has the right guy, the other should be.

Charging documents state a male entered the couple’s home armed with a gun. Two cell phones were stolen, two teeth were knocked out of the family’s dog mouth and both the man and the woman assaulted.

The woman was raped and sodomized, court records state. Other details of their physical injuries weren’t made available.

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Unsurprisingly, Felicia Somnez took issue with Emily Yoffe’s lengthy post about the destruction of Jon Kaiman’s world. She had been offered the opportunity to participate, to “tell her story,” beforehand, but declined. Only afterward did she take issue, and then with a vengeance.

In her 8,000-word story, there was a lot Ms. Yoffe got wrong, so please forgive the length.

What one person perceives as wrong isn’t necessarily wrong, but rather not the story told her way. It used to be that every person was the hero of their own story. Now, every person is the victim of her own story, and Somnez was certainly her own victim. That doesn’t make her the victim. Continue reading →

In the olden days, when there was a dispute that couldn’t be resolved between people, the ultimate response might be, “See you in court.” It wasn’t because everybody liked to hang out in courtrooms, but because they were built to serve a purpose, a place where judges and litigants and, on occasion, juries would do law stuff.

Maybe Judge Richard Berman didn’t get the memo?

“The fact I will never have a chance to face my predator in court eats away at my soul,” said Jennifer Araoz, who has accused Mr. Epstein of raping her when she was a 15-year-old student at a performing arts high school in New York. “They let this man kill himself and kill the chance of justice for so many others in the process, taking away our ability to speak.”

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To read the story is to invite the usual outrage at prosecutorial misconduct resulting in the wrongful conviction of an innocent defendant, the worst our legal system can produce.

A St. Louis judge dismissed a motion for a new trial Friday in the case of a prisoner the top prosecutor there says is innocent.

In denying the motion, 22nd Circuit Judge Elizabeth Hogan said in her ruling that the request to vacate Lamar Johnson’s 1995 murder conviction was 24 years too late. Missouri laws do not allow her to review such claims, she found.

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At his first trial, Bill Cosby’s jury hung. At his second trial, it convicted. There was one overarching tactical shift between the two, that the prosecution was allowed to call witnesses, introduce evidence, of uncharged crimes for the purpose of tainting Cosby, notwithstanding the evidence of guilt for the crimes with which he stood charged. It worked.

With trial coming, although now pushed off to January, 2020, the New York County DA’s office is facing a similar tactical problem, and as was learned from the Cosby experience, its ability to get a conviction is substantially increased by the volume of prejudice it can dump on the defendant even if the evidence is lacking. So it obtained a superseding indictment to include the testimony of Sopranos actress Annabella Sciorra.

Ms. Sciorra, who first shared her story in 2017 with The New Yorker, said that Mr. Weinstein had dropped her off at her apartment in Gramercy Park after a film industry dinner in New York. The producer later appeared at her door, she told the magazine, and pushed his way into her apartment. Continue reading →

Much of the story is utterly commonplace, as home burglar alarms get tripped all the time, and the police showing up is kind of the point. So what’s the problem here?

[Kazeem] Oyeneyin said a friend stayed over that night and tripped the alarm unknowingly when he left. Oyeneyin says he disengaged it and went back to sleep.

“I just laid back down and all I heard was somebody screaming downstairs,” he said. “So I grab my firearm because I don’t know what’s going on. And I run down the stairs and it’s a cop.”

“Hey come out with your hands up,” the officer yells from the door as Oyeneyin is still upstairs.

The good news is that the obvious concern, at the stage where cops confront a guy with a gun, isn’t the story, because it didn’t happen. Continue reading →

Watching the Netflix documentary, American Factory, it was clear why America has and must lose the manufacturing war. We’re fat. They’re compliant. We complain. They conform. We want to work less. They will work as long and hard as they’re told. We work for money. They believe they are serving a greater good by working for excellence. We can deny the cultural differences all we want, but that won’t produce windshields.

There was a complaint that permeated the movie, from the closure of the GM plant that left thousands not just out of work, but out of hope. There was nowhere else to go until Fuyao took over the factory eight years after it was shuttered.

In 2016, Cao opened a division of Fuyao, his global auto-glass manufacturing company, in a shuttered General Motors factory near Dayton, Ohio. Blaming slumping S.U.V. sales, G.M. had closed the plant — known as the General Motors Moraine Assembly Plant — in December 2008, throwing thousands out of work the same month the American government began a multibillion dollar bailout of the auto industry. The Dayton factory remained idle until Fuyao announced it was taking it over, investing millions and hiring hundreds of local workers, numbers it soon increased.

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Gillette tried to sell Woke. It failed miserably, giving birth to a new saying, “Get Woke, Go Broke.” Pivoting a bit, the more than 180 CEOs at the Business Roundtable tried a less direct method of marketing.

Breaking with decades of long-held corporate orthodoxy, the Business Roundtable issued a statement on “the purpose of a corporation,” arguing that companies should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders. Instead, the group said, they must also invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers.

“While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders,” the group, a lobbying organization that represents many of America’s largest companies, said in a statement. “We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.”

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She was once better known as the advice columnist at Slate, Dear Prudence. But for reasons that can only be described as courage and integrity, Emily Yoffe has chosen to put herself in the line of fire of the outraged mob by cautioning prudence in the face of a tidal wave of rape hysteria.

Nobody forced Emily to take on this challenge, of being a voice of reason, of facts, of science, of prudence. Yet she did. No doubt she could have gone with the narrative and accumulated huge numbers of passionate admirers, and all the accoutrements of social media adoration that go with it, but her integrity was not for sale for “likes.”

In her latest post at Reason, she writes of former LA Times Beijing bureau chief Jon Klaiman, who, as the title states, is “radioactive.” Continue reading →