There’s a flip side to the consideration of legalization of marihuana (the official New York spelling for pot). What about the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people saddled with weed convictions? What about the ones with pending cases? Open warrants? What about the guys with enhanced federal sentences because of a criminal history level 2 or lower based upon pot convictions? What about the people deported for the “aggravated felony” of a marijuana conviction?

And then, what about the people who are dead, because sometimes a gun goes off and a projectile is expelled from its barrel into someone’s head during an arrest for weed?

Mayor Bill de Blasio has called for expungement of marijuana convictions as part of his concept of “righting historic wrongs.” Unsurprisingly, the historic wrongs aren’t marijuana convictions, per se, but the disparate arrest, prosecution and conviction of minorities. Continue reading →

When a twit from NBC News showed a bizarre video of a high school wrestler, Andrew Johnson, of Buena Regional High in New Jersey, getting his hair cut on the mats, my first reaction was to wonder why he would let anyone do that to him. Then again, he’s not me, nor I him, so the question instead was what was he thinking.

A New Jersey referee who forced a high-school wrestler to cut his dreadlocks right before a match has been barred from further officiating pending an investigation into the incident, school district officials said Friday.

The unnamed Buena Regional High School student was told at a match Wednesday night that his hair and headgear were not compliant with regulation and would have to instantly cut his long locks or forfeit the round, according to a statement Friday from the Buena Regional School District.

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New York’s occasionally inconsistent mayor, Bill de Blasio, has decided to stand up for the legalization of recreational weed, despite the fact that pot smokers by the tens of thousands have been arrested under his watch even though many, maybe even most, committed at worst an infraction, for which a summons should have been issued, rather than a misdemeanor, for which they get arrested and spend the night at the Hotel Tombs.

But hey, the wind is blowing the right way, and that whiff of weed is in the air, so BdB follows his nose.

Legal marijuana is at a crossroads. We can either let corporate cannabis take control or let the will of the people win the day. pic.twitter.com/UEIu6CYF5V

— Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) December 21, 2018

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In a variation of the social justice notion of “privilege,” that some of us by the fortune of our birth, skin color and gender, are given undeserved status that is denied others, Michelle Alexander of “The New Jim Crow” fame, argues that none of us deserve to be American citizens.

Answering these questions may be easy legally, but they’re more difficult morally. After all, none of us born here did anything to deserve our citizenship. On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?

There is a tangential aspect to this question, given that we’re deluged with cries that we are an awful country, replete with racism and sexism, run by an amoral ignoramus. Why then would anyone from elsewhere want so desperately to take huge risks to come here unlawfully, to a nation where women are sexually assault hourly and half the nation carries guns with which to commit mass murder of the other half? Yet, they do. Continue reading →

In the aftermath of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court, there were 83 ethics complaints filed against him. As Joe Patrice artfully put it, “— 83 of them! — ” That’s a lot of complaints.

The complaints about Kavanaugh generally alleged that he lied during his nomination proceedings, made “inappropriate partisan statements that demonstrate bias and a lack of judicial temperament” and was disrespectful to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his September hearing, the panel’s decision noted.

The complaints didn’t come from litigants personally affected, but from the usual suspects: lawyers, academics, members of the public, all of whom enjoyed their power as Americans to complain about a judge. Given the heat, it’s rather remarkable that there were only 83 complaints,  Continue reading →

It’s not unheard of for a lawyer in court to have ingested a bit of demon liquor, but it’s usually not the prosecutor. Clarke County Attorney Michelle Rivera is an exception.

[O]n Oct. 18, before Simmerman’s plea hearing, a Clarke County sheriff’s deputy noticed Rivera in a courtroom. In a criminal complaint, the deputy would later write the attorney was “slurring her words and stumbling on her feet,” and noted that she “sat in a chair and swayed her head back and [forth], actions common with being intoxicated.”

The deputy asked to speak to Rivera in a small room by the courtroom. It was there that he detected the smell of alcohol on her. When she refused to take a breathalyzer test, the deputy arrested Rivera on suspicion of public intoxication.

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Shed no tear. Les Moonves will not go hungry. But the Board of Directors of CBS found a hook to deny his $120 million severance package by terminating him for cause. Even so, it’s not good enough because it wasn’t the “right” cause.

It’s a small sliver of justice for the women who say he harassed them and then ruined their careers when they rebuffed him. But the fact that he stood to gain any money at all exposes the preposterous way that corporate America has treated sexual harassment.

It’s worth noting what should be obvious: Sexual harassment is illegal. That has been the case ever since Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, a 1986 Supreme Court decision that said that sexual harassment violates laws prohibiting workplace sex discrimination. And yet companies that catch an executive engaging in this illegal act can’t always fire him for cause. Even more typically, they turn a blind eye to such conduct. It bears repeating: This behavior violates the law.

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The Fourth Circuit majority opinion described it as a “a chant that glorified violence against women, including rape and necrophilia,” and “repulsive.” The University of Mary Washington rugby team, at an off-campus party, was chanting, or more likely singing, the bawdy 1920’s drinking song, “Walking Down Canal Street.” It set into motion a series of events that included the dissolution of the rugby team and led to the local chapter of Feminist Majority Foundation suing the school under Title IX.

The suit was dismissed on a motion to dismiss in the District Court, but the majority reversed.

The plaintiffs appealed to the Fourth Circuit, and this morning, in an opinion that was shockingly dismissive of the profound implications of this case for free speech, that court reinstated several of their claims. The bulk of the court’s decision turned on whether UMW “exercise[d] substantial control over both the harasser and the context in which the known harassment occurs,” as required to establish Title IX liability under the Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education.

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Maybe Idris Elba will play a lawyer in the movies, but he’s not one for real, no matter how sexy he is. That didn’t stop him from parroting the same simplistic slogan that cops have used forever to persuade people from refusing to consent.

British actor and 2018 “sexiest man alive” Idris Elba recently told The Sunday Times that the #MeToo movement is “only difficult if you’re a man with something to hide.” Vanity Fair contrasted Elba’s uncompromising stance with remarks made by Matt Damon and Henry Cavill, who both had to walk back their criticisms of #MeToo’s potential excesses and their perceived sympathy for accused men.

The appeal of the simplistic is undeniable. Short. Pithy. The sort of “answer” anyone, no matter how mind-numbingly shallow, can grasp. Continue reading →

While she never got that television show of her own, she did get to see her name emblazoned across the screen on Saturday Night Live and was interviewed on the Today Show. Ingham County Circuit Judge Rosemarie Aquilina was a star.

[Aquilina] told Today Show hosts Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie that she was surprised and pleased by how much the world took notice of Nassar’s case.

“This is a world-wide epidemic,” she said Monday. “It opened the world to say ‘me too, let’s start the discussion,’ which should have happened years ago and this (the widespread abuse by Nassar) never would have happened.”

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