When people learn that it’s not merely lawful, but encouraged, for special agents to lie to people in order to “catch” them or get them to admit to a crime, they are offended. When you add to the mix that it’s a crime for a person to lie to them, they get outraged. How is it possible that this is allowed?

Welcome to criminal law.

Professor Stephen Carter and Ken White (of the Popehat website) have written two columns raising a point that has bothered me for a long time.

That can happen, you know. They write. Someone gets bothered. Continue reading →

A snarky, pointed retort to the monumentally idiotic notion of arming teachers was that Philandro Castile was a black teacher with a gun, and look what happened to him. And look how the NRA didn’t give a damn. Except Castile worked in a school kitchen and wasn’t a teacher, not that this detail mattered to the 140,000 people who “liked” it.

There was an argument to be made that there are black teachers who could very well find themselves in Philandro Castile’s situation, with the same result. But there is no argument to be made that he was a “legally licensed” teacher, as George Ciccariello-Maher wrote. It was, in a word, false. It was within throwing distance of true, but it was not true.

The Intercept, which bills itself as doing “fearless, adversarial journalism,” has started posting articles by Shaun King. His latest appears under the headline The NCAA Says Student-Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid Because the 13th Amendment Allows Unpaid Prison Labor. It’s far better written than his other writing, which is a testament to good editing at the Intercept, but otherwise, it’s pure King. Continue reading →

Robby Soave at Reason explains the impetus for a proposed Kansas bill to decriminalize sex.

A Kansas state legislator has proposed a bill that would decriminalize consensual sexual contact between kids under the age of 14—a much-needed update to the state’s draconian laws, which currently criminalize sexual contact up to age 16.

Democratic Rep. Dennis Highberger’s bill, HB 2738, would remove the criminal penalties associated with consensual sexual acts committed between kids ages 11 to 14. “Children of these ages are together in junior high school, and any sexual experimentation between them would be much better handled by parents, teachers and counselors than by the juvenile justice system,” said Highberger, according to The Wichita Eagle.

Most parents aren’t pushing their kids to go out and engage in sexual adventures. But then, they were young once, too. That first kiss. The nervousness when you first held hands or put your arm around your date’s shoulders at the movies. We know that kids do such things, and where it leads. And that it’s all part of growing up. Continue reading →

It started as a twitstorm on Valentine’s Day, and was catchy enough to make it into the New York Times.

Deeper even than the gun problem is this: boys are broken.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) February 15, 2018

It was the catchphrase, “boys are broken,” that did the trick for Michael Ian Black, a comedian (his twitter bio says “nine years in the NFL. Two rings) and actor.

America’s boys are broken. And it’s killing us.

That’s a rather broad assertion. It came after the Parkland High School shooting, and rather than go the “guns are the problem” route that many took, he made a hard left into toxic masculinity. Continue reading →

It could not have been issued at a worse time, when the rawness of the slaughter of 17 high school students remained fresh and brutal. And there could be no vehicle less demanding than a dissent to a denial of certiorari. But Justice Clarence Thomas’ 14-pages appeared nonetheless, without any other justice signing on to his polemic.

On the other hand, given the nature of his opinion, it could only appear in a dissent to a denial of cert. That was part of the problem against which he argued. And what use is life tenure if not to express views that the other eight would not? That it came at such a bad time was either a product of exceptional tone-deafness or couldn’t be helped. The denial issued inopportunely, leaving Thomas with the option of dissenting then or saying nothing.

Sometimes saying nothing is the better choice. It’s not the choice Thomas made.

California has a ten-day waiting period for the purchase of guns. The justification is rational. Continue reading →

The most dangerous time on the street is at the end of a shift. Sure, they could do the buy and bust at the beginning of the shift and then spend the rest of their time processing the perps, filling out the reports, waiting for the prints to come back, but that’s not how they roll.

Accusations about the practice — known as “collars for dollars” — have dogged the department for decades. The Mollen Commission’s 1994 report about police corruption, which used the term, detailed the various and devious overtime schemes that have been used.

There are myriad ways in which cops game the system for overtime. The problem is that it means money in their pockets, but it lacks the sizzle of a dead body of an innocent person caught on video.  Continue reading →

At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf uses the Bari Weiss twitter attack as a vehicle to challenge the value of “call-out culture,” the social justice reaction to whatever is perceived as a violation of their orthodoxy.

The writer Mark Joseph Stern, who had the last reaction, argued that “the original tweet—while not maliciously racist by any means—perpetuated the real and serious problem of the ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotype that dogs so many Asian-Americans.” Agree or disagree, anyone can understand that critique. What I don’t understand—what I’d still like to understand—is the approach taken by the many people who treated the tweet as if it were malicious; or who attacked or “dragged” Weiss; or treated her with fierce hostility. I want to know if and why they believe their approach can plausibly advance social justice.

Was Conor’s question, what purpose is served by attacking Bari Weiss even if one exists in the same neighborhood as Stern where everything must be scrutinized, twisted, rationalized, to find its inherent if unintentional heresy, itself a wrong? Enter Vox co-founder, Matty Yglesias. Continue reading →

Malarkey won’t pay the bills, as the ABA delegates were told. It’s dying and executive director Jack Rives gave the bad news.

Quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ABA Executive Director Jack Rives told the ABA’s policy-making body that “this is no time to … take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,”and called on ABA leadership to take action to increase lawyer members.

Whenever someone gratuitously quotes MLK, the stink of desperation permeates the air. And the ABA’s circumstances are nothing if not desperate.

Forty years ago, 50 percent of the lawyers in the United States were members of the ABA. The ABA currently has a 22 percent market share.

Continue reading →

It must have been awful, aside from the huge paychecks, working for Google.

[A] pervasive environment of disparaging jokes and demeaning language amongst colleagues; a climate of bullying, mocking, and personal attacks from superiors and others in power; an open endorsement by superiors of bullying (referred to internally as social pecking); an unwillingness by superiors and administrators to act upon threats of violence; the use of incentive programmes to promote and celebrate harassment; a set of training programmes that foment hostility through emotionalised and unnuanced company-endorsed lectures; and a number of other mechanisms that disincentivise or punish political expression,…

No, this wasn’t the way minorities were treated. Nor women. This was the way they treated anyone who failed to keep pace with social justice As James Damore found out the hard way. the claims that they were open to criticism may have been exaggerated.  Continue reading →

Stare hard at Philadelphia’s new district attorney, Larry Krasner. He is the poster boy, the first really serious reform prosecutor to be elected. Sure, there are Democrats elected prosecutor, many of whom talk progressive and, to some extent, are engaged in reforms, but compared to Krasner, they barely scratch the surface.

Larry Krasner is going at it hard.

On the same day a Philly.com op-ed was published in which Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (and Mayor Kenney) admitted the failure that was the “War on Drugs,” in the 1980s and ’90s, the DA’s office announced that it is suing 10 pharmaceutical companies in connection with the opioid epidemic and is dropping all outstanding marijuana possession charges.

Whether it’s the job of a prosecutor to sue anyone is a dubious proposition, but that’s how Krasner is interpreting his mandate. But that he’s “dropping all outstanding marijuana possession charges” is another matter. Continue reading →