The Bronx may be the harshest testing ground in the nation, so if Robin Steinberg* could prove it works in the Bronx, you can bet it will work in Tulsa. And it matters, because as co-founder of the Bronx Freedom Fund, David Feige, says, channeling Newton:

A body incarcerated stays incarcerated. A body free stays free.

Bail. The ramifications of being poor in the legal system are manifest. Losing jobs, apartments, cars, children, education, all because a defendant can’t make bail on a misdemeanor is the foremost driver of guilty pleas. It has nothing to do with being guilty, but with getting out of jail as quickly as possible. When we speak of the crime of poverty, this is where it happens. Robin is doing something about it.

In the last 10 years, a small charity called the Bronx Freedom Fund has donated bail money to thousands of poor New Yorkers charged with crimes, freeing them from jail and helping them avoid the dispiriting delays of backlogged local courts as they wait to go on trial. Continue reading →

A call came in from an unfamiliar cellphone number. I grabbed it, and it was a documentary film producer. She told me that she got my name from Ron Kuby. That was my first clue. Ron and his partner, Bill Kunstler, represented Darryl Cabey, one of four young men who were shot by Bernhard Goetz in 1984. That was when I met Ronny and we became friends.

My partner, Howie Meyer, and I represented one of the other young men, Troy Canty. Cabey was the most sympathetic of the four, having been paralyzed by Goetz. Canty was the least sympathetic, having been the kid who asked Goetz for money on the subway, the kid who pointed the mythical “sharpened screwdriver” at Goetz.

Howie has since passed away. Bill too. It’s now just Ronny and I, the surviving lawyers*. The producer, in a cold call, wanted to know things, starting with where Troy Canty is today. I told her I have no clue. It was surprising to someone who today viewed this monumental case, a case with lessons and messages that deserve to be remembered and retold, that someone intimately involved wouldn’t have followed this closely forever, but the truth was that we did what we could to help Troy Canty survive the nightmare, change his life for the better and then, well, life moved on.

At first, Troy Canty enjoyed the attention that engulfed him after he and three other teen-agers had been shot by Bernhard H. Goetz in an IRT subway car, Mr. Canty’s lawyer said yesterday. Continue reading →

What goes around comes around.

Right now it is a he said / he said situation, over alleged events nearly 40 years ago. But those that know me understand that non-consensual acts are so antithetical to my values and my practices, the very idea that someone would accuse me of this is quite personally painful.

No, this isn’t Roy Moore. It’s not some college guy you never heard of being burned at the Title IX stake. It’s the paragon of social justice, George Takei. And just like any other person accused, he deserves the opportunity to challenge his accuser, to deny his commission of the offense and to not be punished for it before being proven guilty.

Some, like Louis CK, have decided to admit their guilt, which may reflect some sincere acknowledgement of their wrongful conduct, or may be the better path in crisis management. Others, like Harvey Weinstein, have been thrown under the bus by their own “adviser,” and are trying to fight back a tidal wave. Continue reading →

The headlines highlight the most easily digestible reason why a Trump nominee for a federal judgeship, already approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote, is unqualified for the position.

The New York Times: Trump Nominee for Federal Judgeship Has Never Tried a Case

NPR: Federal Judicial Nominee Who Has Never Tried A Case Advanced By Senate Committee

The Los Angeles Times: Trump judge nominee, 36, who has never tried a case, wins approval of Senate panel

Each of these stories pounds on one additional factor, that the ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary found Talley “unqualified.” And he is, most assuredly, unqualified. But not because an ABA committee said so.  Continue reading →

Amidst the avalanche of male sexual deviancy is a surprising trend. Harvey Weinstein did it. Louis CK did it. They masturbated in front of women. I rarely agree with the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, but I’m totally with him on this.

I was also so young & naive that I thought the whole point of masturbation is that it’s an act you do privately. https://t.co/xvghbg0dLQ

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 9, 2017

And I’m so old and naive that I thought the same thing. If anything, the idea of being in proximity of another person, especially one for whom a sexual desire exists, would evoke thoughts of anything but masturbation. Continue reading →

As everybody except Jeff Sessions and a handful of the guys at PoliceOne know, crime has fallen dramatically. This would be a good thing, but for the fact that it means all the things we absolutely must do to prevent crime can’t be excused under the circumstances, which is why Sessions is desperately trying to thread the needle between fact and fear. But I digress.

Crime is down. Way down. And there is a brand new explanation for why.

Most theories for the great crime decline that swept across nearly every major American city over the last 25 years have focused on the would-be criminals.

Their lives changed in many ways starting in the 1990s: Strict new policing tactics kept closer watch on them. Mass incarceration locked them up in growing numbers. The crack epidemic that ensnared many began to recede. Even the more unorthodox theories — around the rise of abortion, the reduction in lead or the spread of A.D.H.D. medication— have argued that larger shifts in society altered the behavior (and existence) of potential criminals.

Continue reading →

Admission to a university like Cambridge is no small feat. It reflects innate intelligence and accomplishment. And isn’t that good enough?

Please be careful how you handle yourselves here in these early weeks: remember that you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a “good time” – and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern in possible or acceptable.

Physical Sciences is a VERY hard subject, which will require ALL of your attention and your FULL brain capacity (and for a large fraction of you, even that will not be quite enough). You can ONLY do well (i.e. achieve your potential, which rightly or wrongly several people here assumed you have) I you are completely focused, and learn to enjoy the course. People who just TAKE the course, but enjoy their social life, can easily survive in many subjects — but not in this one.

This came in an email from Prof. Eugene Terentjev to first-year Natural Science students, and all hell broke loose. Continue reading →

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will face a very difficult decision about whether two Sloan school profs at MIT should be held liable for the suicide of one of their students.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard arguments Tuesday concerning whether MIT, along with two Sloan professors and an S3 dean, should be held responsible for the 2009 suicide of PhD student Han Nguyen G.

Sloan is the name of MIT’s business school, and S3 is student support services. The nature of the student population may be a bit more peculiar than most given their selection process and culture. Continue reading →

The first time a lawyer walks into the pens can be a shock. The first thing that hits you is the smell, a mix of body odors and fluids, and solids, that may be the most awful smell you ever endure. And then you get to the cells, filled with the detritus of humanity.

To be sure, there are good, normal people in there. And there are the dregs of society. There are the mentally ill and the unfortunately sane. There are the guilty and the innocent, locked together for maybe 24 hours. This will come as a surprise to people who only read the sad anecdotes of the vulnerable and unfortunate written by the unduly passionate, but some of these people are disgusting and dangerous. Whether one prefers Dante or Kafka doesn’t matter at that point. Until you get out, that is your world.

That is also the world of the criminal defense lawyer, and more particularly, the public defender. And rarely are the words “toxic environment” more appropriate.

A half-dozen employees of the Cook County Public Defender’s office have filed a sexual harassment lawsuit, claiming county officials have done nothing to protect them from inmates who masturbate in front of them during visits to the jail and courtroom holding cells.

Continue reading →

Before cellphone and body cameras were ubiquitous, our arguments at arraignment and trial about the beating cops gave a defendant fell on deaf ears. The counter-argument was easy: why would this heroic, dedicated officer of the law, who doesn’t know the defendant from Adam and certainly has no personal animosity against him, possibly want to gratuitously harm him? Of course, we now know, because there are tons of videos on Youtube, that it happens all the time. Why? Who knows? Who cares? It happens. There may be no good reason, but it happens.

It’s the same argument for why no woman would allege rape if it didn’t happen. Or no black person would falsely claim to be the victim of a racist attack. Why would anyone do something like that?

After an unidentified troll wrote the threatening words “Go home n—-r” on dormitory message boards at the Air Force Academy prep school in September, Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria, the academy’s superintendent, delivered a blistering speech on tolerance. With 4,000 students standing at attention, he said, “If you demean someone in any way, you need to get out.”

The speech went viral, garnering more than 2 million views on YouTube.

Continue reading →