In its effort to present a balanced portrayal of the presumed sexual assault epidemic on American college campuses, a weird thing happened.

There is an epidemic of sexual violence on America’s college campuses, according to some researchers. Sky News travelled to Ohio, home to several large universities and a huge student population, to find out more.

Notably, the opening graf begins with the conclusion that there is, there must be, an epidemic. Like too many “deep dives” and empirical studies, the question begins not with whether the phenomenon is true, but begs the question. This is one of the reasons this article is interesting.

It’s a notoriously hard thing to measure but one estimate suggests that as many as one in four students will be subjected to a serious sexual assault before they graduate.

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When Senior District Court Judge Richard Kopf wrote the “dirty old man” post at his blog, Hercules and the umpire, I cringed. Not because I didn’t get his point, but because I knew, with absolute certainty, that most people wouldn’t, and would instead hang on the words of an old joke* in an effort to hang Judge Kopf. And so I leapt into the fray, not because I agreed with his choice of words, but because the castigation he would (and did) receive was misguided.

Here, I do so again.

How Appealing:

“[All female] Law Clerks for Workplace Accountability launches a web site, a Twitter account, and issues its ‘Response to the Federal Judiciary Workplace Conduct Working Group’s Report.’”

New Spanish Inquisition by SJWs? Thank goodness for Article III.

RGK pic.twitter.com/SSicuI41rO

— Richard G. Kopf (@JudgeKopf) July 20, 2018

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Maggie Haberman is an excellent reporter, a big player in the big leagues of journalism as the White House correspondent for the New York Times. And like many in her position, and indeed like many who aren’t in her position but have just had enough of the constant onslaught of idiocy, she’s decided to take a twitter hiatus.

That’s cool. Many others have, and many of us take the occasional week or month off from the never-ending reminder that the average IQ is 100, and half of all twitter users are below that. But Haberman didn’t just log off. She wrote an op-ed.

The evening before, I had complained to a close friend that I hated being on Twitter. It was distorting discourse, I said. I couldn’t turn off the noise. She asked what was the worst that could happen if I stepped away from it.

There was nothing I could think of. And so just after 6 p.m. last Sunday, I did.

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The mural on the wall of the student union at the University of Manchester included the poem “If” by beloved British author Rudyard Kipling. The irony is overwhelming.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

So naturally, it had to go. Continue reading →

Hartford has had a long history of being a pretty nasty city when it comes to cops beating on people. Whether that makes it worse, or different, than a lot of other places can be debated, but what matters is that it’s less than user-friendly for many. Bloomfield High School football coach Tylon Outlaw felt something, but it was not the love.

The coach had gone to a Hartford restaurant to meet with friends regarding a proposed business venture. Upon leaving, he spoke with several other friends he recognized in a taxi cab.

An undercover Hartford detective driving an unmarked car yelled at the coach, “Hey motherfucker.”

Perceiving this to be an informal urban pleasantry, he responded in kind.

That was in 2004, when he was a college football player and “urban pleasantries” were more freely exchanged. It turned out to be less pleasant than expected. Continue reading →

Judge Richard Kopf doesn’t care much about the “vanishing jury trial,” mostly because he’s got so little faith in humanity.

Indeed, I sometimes joke that jury trials are unconstitutional because no sane person would randomly select from the great unwashed 12 stiffs to make a decision that can significantly impact both the public and the defendant. Besides, criminal jury trials are almost always a waste of time. With few exceptions, federal criminal jury trials are the equivalent of one long guilty plea where the defendant has rightly calculated that he or she has nothing to lose and is hoping to win the lottery.

Of course, Judge Kopf isn’t entirely serious when he says that, recognizing that the occasional innocent defendant gets indicted and, without a trial, he would never have the option of being maxed out on the back end to remind him of the folly of rolling the dice. Continue reading →

The story is tragic. The death of anyone is awful, but the death of an infant strikes us harder than any other. They’re helpless and pure, and when an infant dies, there’s a visceral need to blame. Infants aren’t supposed to die. And certainly not at their mother’s breast.

It was 3 a.m. and Samantha Whitney Jones’s 11-week-old son was crying.

So, Jones did what many mothers would do: She sat down and tried to breastfeed him.

About five hours later, her baby would be dead. The cause of death, prosecutors say, was a “lethal combination of drugs” ingested through Jones’s breast milk.

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It takes a certain kind of person to choose to read through a tax form. It takes a certain kind of person to read through a 127 page tax form. Bruce McLeod is that kind of person, when the tax form is from the American Bar Association. But what he found on page 118 of Form 990 was, well, interesting.

In 2017, the ABA became aware of an unauthorized diversion of assets totaling approximately $1.3 million over a period of multiple years, committed by a non-management staff member. The employee was immediately placed on administrative leave when the unauthorized diversion of assets was detected and was terminated the following day. The ABA commenced an investigation and notified both the Executive Committee of its board of directors and law enforcement, with whom the ABA has cooperated fully in the ongoing investigation. Furthermore, forensic experts from the accounting firm of Grant Thornton were engaged to participate in the investigation along with the ABA Internal Audit, Financial Services staff and the General Counsels Office. The ABA reviewed and revised procedures including more stringent controls and monitoring and increased financial oversight. The ABA is in the process of seeking recovery of the funds from its insurance carrier.

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Whether to write this post was a struggle.* On the one hand, to do so only draws more attention to a bad thing. On the other hand, the writer is someone of so little significance that no one of any worth gives a damn about what he has to say, although in this instance he managed to get a post published at a soapbox somewhat over his head, giving him a broader reach than he could possibly manage on his own.

But there are more hands involved. The people this writer threw under the bus for his own self-aggrandizement are no better served by me adding fuel to this dumpster fire, even if my purposes are better intended. And on the fourth, and final, hand, these people are far more kind and considerate than the little shit who burned them, offering explanations for this bizarre affront. That is, until the writer’s reaction to a request to take the offending post down was met with their friend’s response of “fuck you.” Continue reading →

Lacking the mad skillz of Yale law students to know with absolute certainty that the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court means “people will die,” it seemed prudent to consider what Judge Kavanaugh had actually said or written in the past rather than to assume he would reverse Roe v. Wade on the first Monday in October.

This will come as a shock to some people, but the Court deals with issues other than abortion. One such issue is criminal law, and for those of us who practice criminal defense, it’s kind of important too.

I, for one, am not surprised that Trump didn’t nominate the progeny of Thurgood Marshall, or William O. Douglas, or even Earl Warren (although he may have, but time will tell) to the Court. Why would he? Then again, neither did President Obama, whose final nominee, Merrick Garland, was more likely to sit at Sam Alito’s lunch table than Sonia Sotomayor’s. Continue reading →