Lawyers. You can’t live with them, but you can’t live without them after the commencement of a criminal prosecution.* So the en banc Sixth Circuit, in its intermediate wisdom, has provided a roadmap to circumvent the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy explains.

The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” Yesterday, in Turner v. United States, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, sitting en banc, considered whether this right applies prior to criminal indictment. By a vote of 12-4, the Sixth Circuit concluded the answer is “no” — at least under current precedent.

And it’s clear, under current precedent, that the court arrived at the only answer possible. Judge John Bush concurring: Continue reading →

Social media can be a joy or nightmare, according to the moment. When random people “like” your twits, you feel so validated. When they twit back that you’re the ginchiest, you bask in the warm glow of their love. But when some random, unknown frogboy responds that you should be raped?

This week, Amnesty International released a report declaring the social network “a toxic place for women.”

“The company’s failure to meet its responsibilities regarding violence and abuse means that many women are no longer able to express themselves freely on the platform without fear of violence or abuse,” Amnesty International said.

The human rights group conducted research on the site between December 2016 and March 2018, interviewing 86 women and non-binary individuals in the United States and United Kingdom about their experiences. The organization also conducted a separate survey of 1,100 British female Twitter users: 62 percent of them experienced abuse, while 78 percent said they didn’t feel they could express their opinion without being trolled.

Continue reading →

If you’re a prisoner serving an indeterminate sentence in New York, your god isn’t Jesus, Allah or Pasta. It’s the Parole Board. A purely political gang, accountable to no one, which holds literal life or death power over you. It’s not that the power can be used arbitrarily, but that there is no other entity that can grant you parole after you’ve served your minimum sentence. And all it takes for them to hold you in prison until the day you die is a shrug and nah.

This applies to prisoners sentenced as adults. This applies to prisoners sentenced as youths. All must pray to the Parole gods, or they will rot until their 15 to life has maxed out. Judges have tried to force the Parole Board to do their job, to no avail. Even if the Parole Board’s denials are pro forma malarkey, the most they can do is order the board to do is reconsider, getting another denial plus more empty words. Some victory.

Cravath has taken on the cause on behalf of plaintiffs, as a class action, who were sentenced as juveniles, making an end run around the Parole Board by suing for a violation of their constitutional rights in the Southern District of New York. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

On Saturday, March 17, 2018 in Sacramento, Stephan Alonzo Clark was in his grandparents’ back yard. Police, who were looking for a man suspected of breaking car windows, came into the backyard, confronted him, and fired 20 rounds, killing him.

Clark was not armed and only had a cellphone. The Sacramento Police have a policy of releasing their video within 30 days of an officer-involved shooting. Having reviewed the videos[i] , they illustrate a common problem in the way we currently train police officers.

(This video is from the Washington Post, and they have synchronized the audio from all the body cameras and the helicopter.) Continue reading →

Not just overweight, but obese. Americans continue to get fatter.

American adults continue to put on the pounds. New data shows that nearly 40 percent of them were obese in 2015 and 2016, a sharp increase from a decade earlier, federal health officials reported Friday.

The prevalence of severe obesity in American adults is also rising, heightening their risks of developing heart disease, diabetes and various cancers. According to the latest data, published Friday in JAMA, 7.7 percent of American adults were severely obese in the same period.

The reasons are fairly obvious. We eat processed, carb-laden, sugary foods, provided they’re gluten-free. We don’t get nearly enough exercise, if you don’t count your finger moving whenever the tone alerts you to a new Facebook “like.” Continue reading →

Congress went and did it.

Today was a dark day for the Internet.

The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users. As lobbyists and members of Congress applaud themselves for enacting a law tackling the problem of trafficking, let’s be clear: Congress just made trafficking victims less safe, not more.

Sex trafficking sounds like a terrible thing, and it is, provided trafficking had a meaningful legal definition. It doesn’t. It’s a scary word that conjures up images of swarthy evil men driving trucks with young slave virgins to smoky rooms with purple velvet chaises. If that was what we were talking about, maybe a law could be fashioned to stop it and we would all applaud. But it’s not.  Continue reading →

Dersh is on the left. Toobin is on the right. Cooper is in the middle.

Some see Dersh as the voice of reason, fighting Trump Derangement Syndrome. Others, like Toobin, see him as a Trump apologist, pandering for the sake of keeping his mug on the telly as the former Harvard lawprof who takes a contrarian position to the more woke Larry Tribe. Continue reading →

People get miffed when they realize they’ve been played. Then again, they realize it so rarely that it’s not really a big deal for those doing the playing. Come up with something that, in the first few seconds of attention, gives people that warm and fuzzy feeling and you own them.

It worked for people, as the SJWs swoon for Preet Bharara, Sally Yates, Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe because they were unceremoniously fired by Trump, without the slightest clue what they were doing with the rest of their prosecutorial and law enforcement careers. It works for DoJ consent agreements, which tell tragic stories and change nothing.

And it works for things with cool sounding names, like Conviction Integrity Units. Continue reading →

Stephon Clark was killed in his backyard. His crime was holding a cellphone while being black. The cops made up some story about a crow bar, but there was video and it was a lie. Elie Mystal was rightly enraged, and wrongly lashed out.

If I tell you that Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old African-American male, was shot to death in his own backyard by the police, white people will immediately start making their peace with his execution. They’ll immediate start trying to justify the killing. Even “good” white people who know that I’m about to tell you another story of unvarnished police brutality will start imagining what combination of actions the VICTIM took that “caused” the cops to shoot him dead in his own yard.

Is that really what the “good” white people will start imagining? Well before Elie was hot on being hot, there were “good” white people trying to stop cops from killing unarmed, innocent people. We were trying to prevent the cops from killing anyone who didn’t need to die from being killed. Black, white, brown, green, they all deserved to survive.  Continue reading →

For the non-lawyers, moot court is where law students argue appeals as if they were real lawyers. All law students are required to do a moot court argument,* and thereafter they can be invited to join teams which compete against other schools.

For years, I judged moot court competitions, and loved it. Law schools invite real judges and lawyers to be the moot court judges, and the job is to question counsel during argument, score them and, after, critique their effort. For years, it was not only fun, but an excellent opportunity to watch some great, and occasionally some awful, law students at work. Most were quite good, and it gave us faith that the profession would survive.

But times changed, and with them, the nature of argumentation by students. I still get invited to judge a few times a year, but I politely decline. The last time I judged, we were prepped by the lawprof running the competition about what we were allowed to ask during argument and say during critique so as not to hurt the little darlings’ feelings. Continue reading →