Garrett Anderson may have been careless, a deadbeat, a Walmart shopper. But did he deserve to be convicted of vehicular homicide and get 15 years, five more than the actual killer?

Anderson of Kennesaw called a locksmith after locking his keys in his car at a Cobb Walmart on May 25, 2014, according to investigators. Anderson told the locksmith, Tansu Kanlica, to follow him to an ATM so he could get the $175 he owed. But then Anderson appeared to try to get away without paying, according to prosecutors, and passed his bank and several ATMs.

During Anderson’s trial, Kanlica testified that Anderson “brake checked” him, and that he swerved left to avoid hitting him, then over-corrected to the right. That’s when Kanlica jumped a curb and struck three teenagers, killing two.

Neither driver stopped. Kanlica had no excuse. Anderson’s excuse was that he didn’t know it happened. After all, he didn’t kill anyone. Continue reading →

It wasn’t long ago that lawyers understood the limits of their defense of their client in the court of public opinion. There were always roles to play, trying to limit the bleeding, defuse false allegations of fact that were metastasizing into the myth of the case. Defend your client’s honor, if not innocence, by affirmatively asserting that he would prevail at trial.

But as Joel Cohen explains, this has changed.

It used to be, before the 24/7 news cycle , that lawyers were more careful, and prided themselves on that. Judges trusted them more, and lawyers tended to trust each other. But now, a lawyer, for example, Michael Avenatti, might literally withdraw from a court proceeding as Avenatti did rather than give up his soapbox, in order to allow himself the ability to try his case in the press.

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There are a few things about ICE, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, that aren’t in doubt. First, it is in desperate need of reform and supervision, as there are agents engaged in outrageous conduct with no one preventing it, overseeing it, protecting undocumented immigrants (particularly children) in its custody from all manner of harm, from drugs to rape. It’s out of control, and there appears to be little interest in the Trump administration to deal with it.

But Abolish ICE, the trendy response to this abortion of an agency, doesn’t deal with the problems either. Without ICE, who watches the borders? Who prevents people from strolling in at will? It almost sounds like, dare I say it, open borders.

Or perhaps they mean abolish one enforcement agency and replace it with an entirely new one, where its agents are sweet and compassionate? At the New York Times, Sean McElwee tries to sell his unicorn. Continue reading →

One of the worst trends in online media is the “open borders” of letting anyone with a pitch to sell buy their way onto a soapbox, and by doing so attain the attributed legacy credibility of being there. If an op-ed appears in the New York Times, then it must mean that it’s Times-worthy. And what about Forbes,* which once used the tagline, “Capitalist Tool”?

Mark Cohen has a legal space business called Legal Mosaic to pitch that relies on the evisceration of such legal niceties as ethics and bar admission that get in the way. After being a civil AUSA and biglaw partner**, his career was spent trying to find ways to beat the system. He was a founder of Clearspire, which was a darling of the cutting edge of new normal. It was going to “disrupt” the law firm model until it went bankrupt. What exactly Cohen’s new business does is unclear. He’s a master of meaningless jargon which ultimately says nothing beyond “we’re cool and different.” What that difference may be is anybody’s guess.

Cohen has written an infomercial for his business, using the Forbes platform, to inform us how to “fix” the ABA. Like everyone else, he accepts that the ABA can’t survive on its current trajectory. Unlike lawyers, he offers the opposite solution and contends that if the ABA rejects everything guild-like and instead reinvents itself to reject every notion of ethical and competent practice, it will survive. Continue reading →

Gov. Andy Cuomo made it abundantly clear that any regulated financial and insurance industry that wanted to function in New York, which is code for Wall Street, would do well to flex its muscle by snubbing the National Rifle Association.

This is about as uncontroversial as an unprincipled dictate could be in New York City, where guns are neither loved nor appreciated by most voters. It’s not a gun haven, and most New Yorkers have a serious hate on guns.

But financial and insurance institutions care nothing about guns. They care about money, and they are regulated up the ying yang. And regulators can make their ability to function, to avoid administrative demands, monstrous delays in approvals, hearings, litigation, fines, a nightmare. In the scheme of making money, the NRA is just one player, and while not an insignificant player, not a big enough player to go to the mattresses over. And so Andy’s gambit played out as intended. Continue reading →

The day of the announcement, I sent a direct message to my friend Ken so that he would be aware, adding:

I have never felt so old, irrelevant and out of touch as I did when I read this.

He lol’d, knowing my thoughts on the subject. My first exposure to Jeong was through Ken’s twits, and for the most part, I didn’t find her views disagreeable as expressed in her posts. She was generally a supporter of free speech, due process, ideas with which I agreed. The only times I saw her twits was when Ken RT’d them, and I noted that she and Ken seemed to get along well. But I never shared his affinity for her.

You see, Sarah Jeong has never been one of my favorite writers. And I swear I tried to like what she wrote. I even read her e-book, “The Internet of Garbage.” But I didn’t, and I said as much back in 2015. Continue reading →

A person, a student, says the word. Maybe it’s a word that is universally recognized as horrible and unacceptable. Maybe it’s a word that was acceptable yesterday, but has been determined to be unacceptable during the overnight parsing of the list of words that must never be uttered. Maybe it’s a word that, well, only the most finely tuned ear can discern as being improper, based upon its Latin root as bastardized by middle English and expressed in Beowulf.

“This must be stopped,” someone within earshot decides on behalf of some other marginalized community of which he’s no member. After all, he gets virtue points for being an excellent ally, and can proudly proclaim to those whose validation he desperately seeks that he was not “complicit.” What must he do? What can he do?!?

Although no ruling was issued, the University of Michigan’s “Bias Response Team” (BRT) isn’t an implicit threat to student free speech rights, said U.S. District Court Judge Linda V. Parker. The program relies on student reports of “biased” speech on campus and contacts the alleged speaker to offer guidance on speaking in a school-approved way. Students who are contacted are not required to respond.

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The word “complicit” has become one of the ubiquitous vagaries hurled at people to shame them for not dedicating themselves to whatever trendy cause is at stake. Sure, you’re not a white supremacist, but if you’re not punching a Nazi, then you’re “complicit.”

The other day, Elie Mystal twitted that any lawyer who would take a job with the DoJ is “complicit.” In an op-ed complaining that Kozinski hasn’t suffered enough, and his victims who stood mute for decades have yet to be validated, lawprof Leah Litman blames the “complicit.”

Sexual harassment often persists because third parties are silently complicit in it. #MeToo requires some retrospection from people who are not harassers themselves.

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Franklyn Williams had a lot to say, and under the circumstances, it’s not entirely surprising. After all, he was about to be sentenced.

Franklyn Williams, 32, is accused of three armed robberies in Richmond Heights and Euclid.

During his sentencing hearing, Williams would not stop talking, despite more than a dozen warnings from Judge John Russo over the course of about 30 minutes. Williams even interrupted his own attorneys.

Not to nitpick, but sentence isn’t imposed on people merely accused, but people convicted.* That said, even the accused is entitled to speak on his own behalf at sentence. Indeed, it may well be the most important speech he utters. Then again, that cuts both ways. Continue reading →

One of the “givens” in Josh Blackman’s effort to prevent various federal judges from issuing a temporary restraining order against the publication of the CAD code for 3D guns is that code is speech. Georgetown lawprof Marty Lederman rejects the notion, calling it a “red herring.”

The “freedom of speech” red herring

Defense Distributed challenged the State Department’s Internet-posting ban as an alleged abridgment of its freedom of speech.  Its theory is based on the idea (as it argues in a brief) that its computer code “is expressive in that it can be read and edited by humans, who can also understand and adjust its output.”

It may be right about that fact:  Some small number of human beings can in some sense “read” and “edit” this code, just as there are some who can “read” most computer programs; the code might even have certain properties associated with a language.

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