It was back in 2012 when the now-woke Preet Bharara made his huge splash by revealing his prosecution of a massive fraud being perpetrated by former employees of the Long Island Rail Road. Massive. MASSIVE!!! How much we adored Preet for protecting the public fisc from these lying, scheming miscreants. No one adored Preet, and accepted his every word about this massive (did I mention massive?) scheme, as much as the media. Rumor is that there was a shrine to Preet at Newsday.

In contrast, an old lawyer called bullshit. He did so over and over, not just because it was “mostly” a sham, but because almost everything being told the public about it was false. And in the process, this “massive” group of individuals and their families affected by this sham found themselves in an impossible position.

Reviled by the public for being fraudsters. No one in the media willing to listen, to learn, that they were spewing prosecutorial nonsense. Their disability payments cut off, threatened with prison, the loss of their homes and savings, humiliation, these were people who not only suffered from a disability in real life, but now suffered from the threat of their lives being destroyed in futuro. And the public was thrilled by it. Continue reading →

The point of a business is to make money, and some entrepreneurs try to distinguish their business with unusual gimmicks. Remember the topless car wash? Whether it’s a good idea isn’t the point. The point is to bring in business, which brings us to the highly competitive enterprise of coffee.

Starbucks? Who would have ever believed that normal sentient beings would spring for $5 to buy a cup of joe they could purchase for $1? They gave the sizes odd names, and came up with beverages by adding -ccino to the end of unrelated words, all to create the fiction that their peculiar tasting grind was better than the swill you could buy for a fifth of the price. And it worked.

That meant that people who wanted to compete had to come up with something different, and so Hillbilly Hotties was born. What’s their gimmick? The police were not amused. Continue reading →

There have been no shortage of screw-ups, from the years of delay in the murder trial of Brian Solano to the 2015 video of the interrogation of Justis Colon, admitting he had the murder weapon at time of the murder, that has miraculously emerged since.

Prosecutors with the Bronx district attorney’s office did not disclose video of a key 2015 NYPD interview until April 2017. But the video, in which another man, Justis Colon, told cops that he possessed the murder weapon, was leaked to Solano’s private investigator Manuel Gomez and provided exclusively to In Justice Today.

As to why each of the three Bronx assistants neglected to turn this over to Solano’s lawyer, Dawn Florio, nobody seems to know much of anything. Oopsie. Sorry.  Continue reading →

Most people know the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery. At least most slavery, as there was a carve out for prisoners.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Now you know. But what about detention facilities holding immigrants? It’s one thing to put prisoners to work, whether cooking meals or breaking big rocks into smaller ones, but contrary to popular ignorant belief, being an undocumented immigrant isn’t a crime, per se, and being held pending deportation isn’t having been duly convicted.

And they still need to eat. Continue reading →

In the olden days of Second Wave Feminism, the goal was gender equality. A study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science shows that the judiciary didn’t get the memo.

Judges may be just as biased or even more biased than the general public in deciding court cases where traditional gender roles are challenged, according to a new study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

This study examined the role of gender bias relating to judges and legal decisions, and the sex discrimination worked both ways, sometimes against women and sometimes against men.

The study sought responses to two hypotheticals (which they called “mock” cases, because it seemed like a cooler name), one involving a discrimination case and another involving a child custody case.  Continue reading →

The Sixth Circuit, like every court, every judge, likes dogs. And so begins its decision in United States v. Perkins.

Many good Fourth Amendment stories begin with dogs. See, e.g., Florida v. Harris, 568 U.S. 237 (2013) (featuring Aldo the dog). And so it is here. This story began when a dog’s sniff alerted law enforcement to a suspicious-smelling package. The dog’s sniff was accurate. The package contained methamphetamine. The intended recipient was “B. PERKINS,” with the address “5831 Rowe Gap RD Belvidere, TN 37306.”

But they went from Aldo the dog to Warren and Brewer, two mutts. Continue reading →

His case gave rise to Joe Goldstein doing the new round of “testlying is still a problem” articles in the New York Times.

The Times examined Mr. Desormeau’s career in an article in October. More recently The Times investigated the phenomenon of “testilying” within the New York Police Department in a series of articles.

Testilying was a hot topic a generation ago as well, and after everybody got done with their “tsking” over it, life went back to normal in the courtroom, with every cop embellishing his testimony, filling in the details, glossing over the gaps, to make sure the bad dude got convicted. As the late Murray Kempton liked to say, “there they go again, framing the guilty.”

But what made 34-year-old former Detective Kevin Desormeau different is that there was no video in the good old days, so it was just the defendant’s word against the cops. Guess who won that pissing match? Continue reading →

The police description of why three plainclothes and two uniform cops* took him out is both “perfect” and makes no sense.

“The suspect then took a two-handed shooting stance and pointed an object at the approaching officers,” the chief said, holding up a surveillance photo of a blurry figure standing next to a bodega ice machine with his arms outstretched.

Why would a person holding a piece of pipe with a knob on the end, described by some as a shower head, do such a thing unless he was trying to commit suicide by cop? You can’t shoot someone with a pipe and a knob. It’s crazy.

But then, 34-year-old Saheed Vassell was bipolar, refused his meds and was well-known in the neighborhood for being disturbed. Harmless, but disturbed. Continue reading →

There’s some room for variation on a police officer’s belt. Their service weapon. Maybe OS spray or a Taser. Cuffs, ammo, a flashlight. What else should they carry? Cato’s Clark Neily says liability insurance.

The total payout for injuries caused by NYPD officers in 2017 was an unprecedented $308.2 million (up from a “mere” $92.4 million in 2007, and $152 million in 2012). That money didn’t come out of the pockets of the officers responsible for the misconduct; the bills were covered by you, the taxpayer.

That’s because police departments nearly always pick up the tab for damages caused by the officers they employ.

Clark looks to the intersection of law and economics for a solution. Continue reading →

A summary reversal ordinarily would capture no interest, but for the dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, with whom the Notorious RBG joined, calling out the obvious to the oblivious.

Its decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.

And that’s the message sent by the majority in its per curiam opinion in Kisela v. Hughes. From a distance, this may look terribly misguided, but close up one realizes that it’s the message the Court meant to send to police, and has been consistently sending to cops since they decided Graham v. Connor, the Reasonably Scared Cop Rule. Continue reading →