It was eleven years ago today that Dr. SJ told me she was busy, to stop pestering her and find something else to do.

Like what?

“Start a blog,” she replied. And so SJ was born. I had no particular purpose at the time. I knew nothing about blogging, but I liked to write. So I did.

Over the years, SJ has gone through a great many permutations, issues that struck my fancy, points I felt like making, occasional personal stories and commentary on the law. There’s a quite a bit packed into the archives, and chances are good that whatever you wish I would write about is already there. I don’t look back at it, and many links from years past are now dead, as other bloggers have come and gone.  Continue reading →

He was called a coward by his fellow cops. He was fired for putting their lives at risk. And he settled his claim for wrongful termination for $175,000. It’s not an insignificant amount of money by any stretch, but it pales in comparison to the cost of the message.

That night, Stephen Mader, then an officer with the Weirton Police Department in West Virginia, responded to a domestic-dispute call. Once at the scene, he encountered a “visibly distraught” man named Ronald J. Williams, court documents said.

Mader was a white probationary cop. Williams was a black man trying to commit suicide by cop. This isn’t surmise, but shown by the fact that the gun he was holding, that he refused to drop, was unloaded.

“I can’t do that,” Williams responded, according to court documents. “Just shoot me.”

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Not being a gamer, the name Nolan Bushnell meant nothing to me. But what he created did, as I, like most young people in the ’70s, spent many hours with Atari’s magical game, Pong. And it seems right that the Game Developer’s Conference would choose to honor Atari’s co-founder with its Pioneer Award. Until it changed its mind.

Brianna Wu took to Twitter to disagree.

What followed was the #NotNolan campaign and a quick article in The Verge that would result in the GDC rescinding the award the very next day, instead choosing to honor “the pioneering and unheard voices of the past.”

Why? Wu didn’t work for Atari. Wu made no claim of being subjected to any impropriety by Bushnell. Wu wasn’t there, and couldn’t have been there. She wasn’t yet alive. So why? Continue reading →

A foundational myth in the myriad considerations when a defendant “chooses” to cop a plea is that it’s consensual. That means, knowing, intelligent and voluntary. And that’s a dubious proposition at best, relying on two primary things: First, that defense counsel adequately and well advises his client. Second, that both lawyer and client possess sufficient information to make a “knowing, intelligent and voluntary” decision.

Hear that sound? That’s Wild Bill Douglas chuckling in his grave.

Taking a page from the U.S. Supreme Court’s heinous playbook, a panel of the Fifth Circuit in June of 2017 reversed a $2 million judgment a jury awarded George Alvarez. In 2006, Mr. Alvarez pled* guilty to assaulting a public servant—a charge levied against him by a detention officer at the Brownsville Police Department (BPD) who claimed that Alvarez attacked him in the jail. Years into his prison sentence, Mr. Alvarez learned of a BPD videotape which proved that the officer lied when he claimed Alvarez assaulted him.

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Maybe it’s not entirely about porn, but Ross Douthat says it doesn’t help.

For anyone who grew up with the ideals of post-sexual revolution liberalism, there is a striking pathos to these educators’ efforts. The sex education programs in my mostly liberal schools featured a touching faith from the adults in charge that they were engaged in a great work of enlightenment, that with the right curricula they could roll back the forces of repression and make sexuality a place of egalitarian pleasure and safety for us all.

All that sexual enlightenment gone to pot. Why? Porn.

Compared to those idealists, the people teaching “porn literacy” have accepted a sweeping pedagogical defeat. They take for granted that the most important sex education may take place on Pornhub, that the purpose of their work is essentially remedial, and that there is no escape from the world that porn has made.

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District of Nebraska Senior Judge Richard Kopf called it his ““terrible sentencing instinct,” when he banged a bank robber with a long sentence. That bank robber was Shon Hopwood, who is now a law professor at Georgetown.

Judge Rosemarie Aquilina was lauded for her intemperate words when sentencing Larry Nassar, from wishing him prison rape to condemning him to life in prison, even though that particular sentence was not within her authority. This was a show of “empathy” for Nassar’s victims, and a reflection of societal outrage. Judge Aquilina’s words conveyed the blood lust that many felt. Sure, her words were harsh, but isn’t that what a judge should do when that’s what people want?

Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Brock Turner to six months incarceration, leading to national cries of outrage and a campaign by a Stanford law prof, Michele Dauber, to have him recalled as a judge so that all judges learn that they either be as harsh as Dauber and her mob demand or suffer the consequences.

At the Intercept, Liliana Segura tells a different story about a different judge and a different defendant and a 241 year sentence. Continue reading →

As the “science writer” for The Atlantic, Ed Yong feels a special duty.

In December 2015, I wrote a story about the potential uses of the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. That piece, based on a conference that I attended in Washington, D.C., quoted six men and one woman. The six men included five scientists and one historian, all quoted for their professional expertise. The one woman was a communications director at a tissue bank organization, and her quote was about her experience as the mother of a child with a genetic disease.

Was his story about CRISPR accurate? Factual? Correct? Bah. The real question was whether he included enough women. Continue reading →

My integrity muse, Appellate Squawk, smacked hard and it stung. Who defended Roy Moore from the absolutely, clearly, irrefutably established fact that he was pedophile? Who was tough enough to point out that Harvey Weinstein has never been convicted of a crime, that not a single disputed allegation against him has been proven? In the public hive mind, these are beyond dispute, and they may very well be the case, but so what?

We’re lawyers. More than just lawyers, criminal defense lawyers. We represent the people society despises. We fight for them. Or at least we used to.

One of my fundamental beefs with criminal justice reform advocates is that they constantly rely on the narrative of the sad, innocent, systemically-maligned defendant. As if the mean, guilty-as-sin defendant is unworthy of constitutional rights, our defense. This is the fallacy of those who use the sympathetic defendant as the mechanism of reform. In the process, we increase the vilification of the vast majority of defendants by contrast. Continue reading →

When the Second Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed with prejudice the indictment in United States v. Tigano for a seven-year delay in trying the case, during which Joseph Tigano was detained, there was applause but little commentary. The opinion, recounting his adjournments, read like a series of unfortunate events, each one of which could be explained or questioned, but happen in the ordinary course of a case.

It was the totality, that added up to seven years of delay for a guy who kept demanding a trial, that took the case over the top. To add insult to injury, it was a marijuana case, which was still very much illegal despite the societal amnesia of the wonderfully woke Obama years.

A vision of the case has now developed that provides an explanation for what happened to Tigano. Jeffrey Bellin at Slate explained. Continue reading →

Would a child lie? Are you really a pedophile apologist? These are things that would be said, and not pleasantly, to anyone who questioned the guilt of Virginia McMartin. But she was vilified, even though it was later recognized that she was completely innocent and the crimes of which she was accused never happened.

Cathy Young braved the mob as it stormed Woody Allen’s gate.

The 82-year-old actor and filmmaker has long been haunted by allegations that he molested his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, more than a quarter-century ago, when she was just seven years old. In 2014, Farrow wrote an open letter with the accusation, and yet the controversy quickly settled down, leaving Allen largely unscathed.

But now it’s 2018, and we live in a different world.

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