[Ed. Note: This is a guest post by my brilliant Fault Lines colleague, Sam Bieler.]

New York’s legislators are about to make a terrible mistake. They are going to repeal New York’s double jeopardy protections to stick it to Donald Trump. Maybe they will succeed. The price of their success will be imperiling every other criminal defendant in New York long after Trump is gone.

Led by newly-elected Attorney General Letitia James, New York legislators are returning to a scheme the previous AG spearheaded in April 2018, to modify New York’s double jeopardy law. That law, CPL § 40.20, states:

A person may not be twice prosecuted for the same offense.

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That Aunt Becky was named in the complaint made it a lock that it would be front page news, but charges against 33 “affluent parents,” not to mention college coaches and others, put the lie to the cries that the only unfairness in college admissions was the dark hole of diversity. It’s a cesspool all around.

When it was time for my son to go to college, I did everything possible to “game” his admission, from prep courses to training with the best fencing coaches to enhance his interests as an athletic recruit. What I did not do is what Willke Farr co-chair Gordon Caplan is alleged to have done, buy my kid’s admission.

I didn’t even know such a thing was possible, but to be honest, if I was ever inclined to bribe someone, it would be for the benefit my kids. Continue reading →

For obvious reasons, there’s a great deal of attention paid to police officers and federal agents who break the law or deprive people of their constitutional rights. But there’s a similar cadre of people, some in uniforms and some not, some with weapons and some not, who evade much scrutiny, though their performance of their job can have as brutal an impact on people’s lives.

From 2009 to 2012 the U.S. Department of Justice charged 254 police officers throughout the United States with violating the individual rights of Americans.

The private security industry remains historically insulated from claims of civil rights-related violations and the resulting criminal sanctions that can be imposed against security personnel. The private security industry in the United States is much larger than the public sector police force; the industry outnumbers public police by a ratio of at least three to one. This growing number of security personnel could lead to increased civil rights violations.

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As a young lad in the well of courtrooms in Manhattan, I came to appreciate how Legal Aid lawyers were the tough, hardened warriors of criminal defense. On the whole, they were a mighty group. Sure, there were lousy lawyers, lazy lawyers in the bunch, and defendants ridiculed their “lemon aids” as being barely lawyers, if lawyers at all. But we knew better. These were killers, unafraid of any prosecutor, any judge, any case.

That Legal Aid Society no longer exists, having been taken over by the toadies to social justice.

A couple of years ago we published “Are you a cissy?” , a spoof of a compulsory training inflicted on us by the boss’s wife who announced a mandatory policy of quizzing our clients about gender issues. On first contact, no less.

No doubt it’s impolitic to make fun of silly decrees when they emanate from the boss’s wife. So we weren’t too surprised that the boss got mad as a wet hen when she saw our blog on the Company email.

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There’s a professor at Sarah Lawrence, the extremely effete, extremely expensive, extremely progressive, northeast liberal arts college, who, according to students there who have joined together to call themselves the Diaspora Coalition, “attacks black and brown bodies.”

They will not stand for it.

“When black and brown bodies are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!” Approaching 6th hour of sit-in with over 120 students occupying Westlands. pic.twitter.com/JkTOW58Afl

— The Phoenix (@SLCPhoenix) March 11, 2019

The professor is named Samuel Abrams. He teaches politics. His weapon is ideas, put into words. His words were like knives cutting out their hearts, their souls, their right to never be required to let unorthodox ideas make them confront the possibility that they weren’t entitled. Continue reading →

In one of those classic “fortuitous” moments that happen at the South by Southwest Festival, which used to be a great opportunity to try ‘shrooms and has since morphed into a great opportunity to be totally progressive or suffer a different type of stoned, Bill Nye the Science Guy asked the last question of the adored Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

Slate, which is chronicling AOC’s rise to power for the newer testament, provides the transcript. Continue reading →

For as long as I’ve practiced law, non-lawyers have argued that the Constitution ought to mean what it says. To lawyers, this evokes the normal round of head-shaking, since “what it says” is the perennial question, and what that means tends to be whatever the person reading it wants it to mean. Words are not precise instruments, no matter how plain they may seem to you.

At ArcDigital (where I also post on occasion), Illinois political science prof Nicholas Grossman argues that we have a derelict Congress for its failure to impeach Trump. Not because of collusion with Russia, or being incapable of telling the truth, but because he has engaged in rampant bribery before our eyes. If we loved the Constitution, then we should demand it be faithfully applied here. Now.

America’s Founders worried a great deal about corruption. They worried so much about a president acting for personal financial gain, rather than exclusively for the interests of the United States, that they forbid it in the Constitution three times.

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A pervasive argument against male students whose lives were destroyed by the flagrant refusal to provide due process in campus Title IX sex tribunals is that colleges are not anti-male, but pro-victim. Is it their fault that it’s almost invariably males who rape females? Or at least, females who allege rape, when both are intoxicated and have consensual sex, only to regret it when their girlfriends tell them they’ve been raped?

Title IX advocacy group, SurvJustice (the “surv” standing for “survivors”), has filed suit against the Department of Education, arguing that changes to Title IX regulations are gender-biased.

The Trump administration on Thursday urged a federal judge to reject claims that gender bias drove Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ decision to rewrite an Obama-era directive on campus sexual assault.

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Change the names from Ellis to Persky, Manafort to Turner, and this opening paragraph sounds remarkably familiar.

The 47-month sentence imposed on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has drawn widespread criticism that Judge T.S. Ellis’s decision to give Manafort a sentence far below the 19.5 to 24.5-year guidelines range was motivated by Manafort’s race and class or by partisan bias. In fact, his flawed decision is a consequence of the vast discretion given to federal judges to issue sentences without real fear of being overturned.

There are three general reactions to the sentence, that it was too harsh, too lenient and about right. Then there was a more detached reaction, that regardless of how it fit Manafort, the best takeaway was that all defendants should be shown less harshness, that sentences have inflated to the point that ridiculously and pointlessly long sentences had become accepted as necessary and appropriate. Any sense of leniency here reflected what sentences should be for every defendant, and mandatory minimums and Draconian guidelines were constraints that undermined the authority of judges to fashion proper, individualized sentences. Continue reading →

Ed Genson, together with Sam Adam, tried R. Kelly’s first case for child porn to an acquittal. You would think that would be the sort of legacy a dying man would want. But not Genson.

Genson is still around at 77, though ill, his usual candor honed by the approach of death.

“I have bile duct cancer,” he said in the paneled study of his Deerfield home. “Terminal cancer.”

Doctors gave him 90 days to live.

“That was a year and a half ago,” said Genson. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

Even death wants nothing to do with him. Continue reading →