Ed. Note: Chris Seaton challenged me to a debate, following the Boy Scouts of America allowing girls to join and changing its name to Scouts BSA. Was this the end of gender distinction? Were they truly just a social construct? Chris will argue the affirmative and I argue the negative:

My wife and I tried. We bought our first child, our daughter, neutral color clothing, non-gendered toys, a doctor outfit rather than a nurse’s. But when she saw grandma’s high-heeled shoes, she swooned. Her first word was “shoes,” and the die was cast.

No, this proves nothing about boys and girls, but just my daughter. But if she prefers pink (she does) and loves shoes (she really does) and chooses to spend her time in the company of her girlfriends rather than male friends, who am I to deny her agency? Continue reading →

Vance Was Elected, Whether Cuomo Likes It or Not

Following the Eric Schneiderman accusations of either assault, rough sex or possibly nothing, the elected District Attorney of New York Count, Cyrus Vance, announced he was starting an investigation, the allegations of at least some incidents occurred within his jurisdiction.

Big deal? It was to Governor Andy, who announced that Vance would be removed from the investigation and it would be handled by Madeline Singas, Nassau County District Attorney. Cuomo has the authority to remove a prosecutor and appoint a special counsel where a conflict of interest exists. But did it?

In an ironic twist, Schneiderman was already investigating how Vance handled Harvey Weinstein, who more than 70 women have accused of sexual harassment and assault. Vance decided to not pursue charges against Weinstein in 2015 despite police having a recording of Weinstein admitting to groping. Weinstein’s lawyer had donated $55,000 to Vance in campaign contributions.

Cuomo said Tuesday morning that he wanted to make sure the DA pursuing the case would “have no conflict whatsoever with the attorney general, either institutionally or personally” to assuage the women in the article who outlined that fear about Schneiderman’s political power and position stopped them going public earlier.

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[Ed. Note: This is an experimental* guest post by one of my favorite criminal law journalists, Christopher Moraff, who writes on the intersection of policing, criminal justice, drug policy and civil liberties. He is a contributing writer at The Daily Beast, and co-host of the forthcoming podcast on drug policy Narcotica.]

On April 8, 1981, President Ronald Reagan issued a proclamation setting aside one week a year to acknowledge the suffering of crime victims and their families, with the goal, he said, of making victims rights “a central concern of those who participate in the criminal justice system.”

The president’s establishment of an annual National Crime Victims’ Rights Week coincided with a bipartisan push in Congress to enact new “tough on crime” legislation that would set the tone for the next three decades of criminal justice policy. Continue reading →

They weren’t angels to begin with, which blunts our ability to feel particularly bad for the three dudes and no doubt animated the prosecution to believe they were guilty and pursue them with unrelenting vigor. But even guys who aren’t angels don’t deserve to go through hell for a crime that never happened.

Three men accused of raping a 9-year-old girl near Vernal more than two years ago were found not guilty on all charges Wednesday.

Larson RonDeau, 38, Randall Flatlip, 28, and Jerry Flatlip, 31, were visibly relieved as the verdicts were read, some hugging their attorneys and another leaning over and thanking his lawyer.

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According to Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, the move will affect 542 people. That’s 542 lives, which is nothing to sneeze at, but the equivalent of about a day’s worth of pot arrests in New York City. But the point isn’t the number, but that Seattle is doing so at all.

The City of Seattle has filed a motion in municipal court to vacate – that is, retroactively void – all misdemeanor marijuana convictions in the city. According to a statement from Mayor Jenny Durkan, the request would effect 542 people. The city has also requested the dismissal of outstanding misdemeanor possession charges. In 2012, Washington became the first U.S. state to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

The headline calls this “decades” of marijuana possession convictions. These preceded Washington State’s legalization of weed in 2012. Why just Seattle and not statewide is unknown, for legalization raises the question of whether it makes any sense to maintain a sentence, to maintain a conviction on someone’s record, for conduct that’s now totally lawful. Continue reading →

When thoughts are outlawed, only outlaws will have thoughts.

–Abraham Lincoln

The bad girl woman of the New York Times, Bari Weiss, did a meet and greet of the “renegades of the intellectual dark web.” They ranged from the thoughtful to the banal, and even those too far toward the edge for Weiss to include in the intellectual club, and she let it be known that they were unworthy of membership. What they had in common was ideas that were unacceptable to . . . someone.

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

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Bail has become a controversial subject, much like weather. Everybody talks about it but few do anything. Google has decided that the woke thing to do is ban bail bond ads from its service, as bondsmen have been vilified as profiteers in the contoversy. And former Department of Justice icons of wokeness think that’s groovy.

No one should be incarcerated simply because they can’t afford not to be. I applaud @Google for taking the unprecedented step today of banning ads for bail bonds from its platforms. https://t.co/jrzOsh8Icg pic.twitter.com/3LijJA5u3X

— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) May 7, 2018

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Hey, if you’re going to believe anything anyone says when it tugs on your heartstrings, why not the cops? After all, who doesn’t love the cute, adorable drug-sniffing dogs?

The training director of a police K-9 academy in Illinois claims that if the state legalizes recreational marijuana, it will likely have to euthanize “a number” of its pot-sniffing dogs, The Pantagraph reports.

There are approximately 275 trained narcotic K-9s in Illinois, with each costing the department thousands of dollars. Replacing the dogs would cost millions, and Chad Larner, the director of Maron County’s K-9 Training Academy, said “retraining” the dogs would be “extreme abuse.”

Not just abuse, which would be horrifying and exhausting, but “extreme abuse.” Would you want a dog to suffer extreme abuse? What kind of a human being are you? Continue reading →

Is your work about performing your job, or is half your time, maybe more, about filling out the paperwork that administrators require of you? Or dealing with the concerns of support staff, for whom you are now their support staff? Has real work become secondary?

For a number of years now, I have been conducting research on forms of employment seen as utterly pointless by those who perform them. The proportion of these jobs is startlingly high. Surveys in Britain and Holland reveal that 37 to 40 percent of all workers there are convinced that their jobs make no meaningful contribution to the world. And there seems every reason to believe that numbers in other wealthy countries are much the same. There would appear to be whole industries — telemarketing, corporate law, financial or management consulting, lobbying — in which almost everyone involved finds the enterprise a waste of time, and believes that if their jobs disappeared it would either make no difference or make the world a better place.

Kinda makes me proud not to practice corporate law.  Continue reading →

New York’s now-ex-Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman fell from grace in the course of half a news cycle. He denies wrongdoing, but that’s no longer relevant.

Until Monday evening New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was a public champion of the #MeToo movement. Now he appears to be the latest sickening example of the scale and insidiousness of the cruelty that movement is confronting. He resigned late Monday after The New Yorker magazine published an article in which four women accused him of abusing them physically and emotionally.

Ronan Farrow ruled. Can there be any doubt after judgment has been handed down?  Continue reading →