For those who yearn for the self-proclaimed Halcyon days of civil rights enforcement under Obama’s Department of Justice, it’s unfortunate that nobody told them that indigent defense in New Orleans was in ruins. No doubt newfound progressive icon Sally Yates would have been on it like Vanita Gupta was on transgender bathrooms. If only they knew.*

But the problems of spectacularly underfunded public defense in Louisiana was bad enough before. So prosecutors figured out a way to make it worse.

Jay Dixon was heading home from Baton Rouge to Lafayette one day when he got pulled over for speeding. As the deputy handed him the ticket, Dixon said, he was told to flip it over. On the back, Dixon found instructions saying he could pay the ticket by mailing a $175 money order made out to “DA P.T.D.”

If he paid the ticket that way, the deputy told him, it wouldn’t go on his record. Plus, it wouldn’t go through court, so he wouldn’t have to pay court costs.

“Who wouldn’t want to do it?” Dixon asked as he recounted what happened.

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Gabriel Cornejo has sex with a woman. It cost him more than a dinner.

In 2003, a child support court in Texas ruled that Gabriel Cornejo, 45, had to pay child support to his ex-girlfriend who had recently given birth because she vowed that there was no way he wasn’t the rightful dad.

And they want the $65,000 in back child support he owes, which hardly seems unreasonable. After all, you do the crime, you do the time, fatherhood edition. But the unnamed woman’s vow “that there was no way he wasn’t the rightful dad” may be deeply persuasive if one believes the survivor, except for this stuff called DNA.

Cornejo, a father who’s raising his own three kids and two nephews, said he found out about the child support payments when a deputy showed up at his door last year. The deputy gave Cornejo court papers that claimed the state of Texas thinks he has another child. Continue reading →

It doesn’t. It never did. It should, but you wouldn’t know that unless you were one of the few people who paid attention to things like law before evil descended on the land. The headline could just have easily read, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

The Justice Department has filed court papers arguing that a major federal civil rights law does not protect employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation, taking a stand against a decision reached under President Barack Obama.

This would be outrageous, but for one thing. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not include homosexuality as a protected class, and Congress has voted annually since 1974 not to amend it to do so. On the bright side, if they had, it would have been characterized as “sexual preference,” as the nation was not yet woke to the belief that sexual orientation was an immutable characteristic.

The cry is that Darth Cheeto’s beleaguered minion is gratuitously pushing his way into the Second Circuit to exert influence on a case between two private parties, where the EEOC has been invited to chime in. Continue reading →

According to a search warrant, Justine Damond “slapped” the patrol car before she was killed by Officer Mohammed Noor.

In the moments before a yoga teacher was fatally shot by Minneapolis police, a woman slapped the officers’ patrol car while it drove through an alley, according to a search warrant application filed this week.

Though the information in the warrant is vague, it could explain the “loud sound” that reportedly startled Officers Matthew Harrity, the cruiser’s driver, and Officer Mohamed Noor, who was in the front passenger seat, just before Noor shot 40-year-old Justine Damond. Harrity described the noise to investigators.

The ridicule for such a lame justification was manifest in signs put up in protest around the Twin Cities, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be argued as sufficient to justify the kill. Continue reading →

One of the mantras of the defense at trial is that it only takes one to hang a jury. The assumption is that the one juror, the brave, bold soul who will stand up to the others, will be on our side. This is not necessarily the case, as Matthew Ness learned in the aftermath of his defense of Jerry Chai.

A California man convicted last month of having improper sexual contact with a Seton Hill University coed wants a new trial, contending that a juror used personal knowledge as part of the deliberations.

Defense attorney Matthew Ness said his client, Jerry Chai, 27, was wrongly convicted of a misdemeanor count of indecent assault after a juror convinced other panel members to issue the guilty verdict based on information that was not part of the evidence in the case.

The underlying allegations are routine: Continue reading →

When J.K. Rowling announced a new Harry Potter-esque book, Anil Dash took to the twitters to complain: there was no character in Harry Potter who looked like his son. I replied, “so write a Harry Potter story and create a character who looks like your son.” Dash didn’t appreciate my suggestion. Other people who create things should do so to suit his desires.

Roxane Gay, who remains under suspicion of dog killing because the absence of evidence is more than enough proof in her world, took to the op-ed pages of the Times (in an otherwise appreciated respite for why Trump is literally Hitler) because there is a television show she does not want to watch.

HBO last week announced it was willing to expend this energy with a series from the “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. In the show, “Confederate,” the South does, indeed, secede from the Union, the Mason-Dixon line is a demilitarized zone and slavery is the law of the land below it. Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman, black television writers and producers, are also attached to the project. They have an incredible body of work behind them and will no doubt bring their considerable expertise to this show.

When I first read about “Confederate,” however, I felt exhausted, simply because I have long been exhausted by slavery narratives. That’s a personal preference, not a metric by which art should or should not be created.

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The thrust of Steven Chapman’s argument, that there are alternatives to cops conducting physical traffic stops that would go a long way in eliminating the potential for violence, whether to a cop or to the motorist, is certainly a worthy topic for discussion. The predicate for his argument, however, is a sham.

Too often, traffic stops lead to tragedy. Philando Castile was shot to death in his car by a police officer in Minnesota. Last week, a mistrial was declared for a University of Cincinnati officer prosecuted for killing 43-year-oldSamuel DuBose, whose car had a missing front license plate. Sandra Bland, yanked out of her car by a Texas state trooper after allegedly failing to signal a lane change, died in jail. All three victims were black.

Data is not the plural of anecdote. Three instances are three too many, and the vague words, “too often,” may be existentially accurate, but wholly uninformative. One instance could be “too often,” but it doesn’t validate the claim.

Cops are also at risk. In March, a police officer died in a shootout with a passenger who ran from a car that had been pulled over in Tecumseh, Okla. In June, a police lieutenant was fatally gunned down after a stop in Newport, Ark.

When an officer stops and approaches a vehicle, both the cop and the driver are vulnerable. Any wrong move or misjudgment can turn the encounter deadly.

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Not that I’m an aficionado of rap music (I’m not), but Rob Hustle is killing it on Youtube.

Music, like humor, is an extraordinarily effective means of communicating a message that may be a bit too tedious to read about. Just as Jay-Z did with 99 Problems, and Rob Hustle did with his last video, Call the Cops,* he does it again here. Great stuff like this deserves as much play as possible, and I am thrilled and honored to do what I can to help Rob Hustle get the eyeballs he deserves.

*This video appears somewhere on SJ, though a quick search failed to find it. If anybody can tell me what post it was, it would be appreciated.

Patrick Frey announced on his blog, Patterico’s Pontifications, that he finally prevailed in the lawfare against him by Brett Kimberlin. He gave credit to the lawyers who defended him:

It is a total and complete victory. There will be no trial. I will pay nothing. I will take down no blog posts about Kimberlin. The lawsuit is simply over. (Of course, he’ll appeal. He always appeals.)

My deepest thanks go to my pro bono counsel: Ron Coleman of Archer & Greiner and the Likelihood of Confusion blog, and Bruce Godfrey of Jezic & Moyse LLC.

I can’t say enough about these guys. They stood by me at all times, working for no pay — all for the righteous cause of defending free speech. Ron Coleman juggled this case with his internationally known pro bono case for the Slants, which resulted in total victory and a landmark opinion for free speech. In addition to his fine legal work with Ron on the briefs, Bruce Godfrey dealt with a prickly and difficult client (that’s me!) on discovery issues, and spent countless hours cataloguing, redacting, and organizing the voluminous discovery — not to mention dealing with the court and Kimberlin, and navigating me and Ron through the Maryland legal world.

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In an op-ed emblematic of the times, Eileen Zimmerman recounts the fall of her ex-husband, Peter, into addiction and, ultimately death. Having spent a good deal of time discussing, and learning, from my dear pal, Brian Cuban, about the walls that make it hard, if not impossible, for an addicted lawyer to seek help, it’s easy to appreciate why a lawyer who falls into that dark hole of drugs or alcohol feels that there is no way out.

But there is a secondary question behind the myriad problems with a lawyer overcoming the pressures and incentive to conceal his problem. While there may be no reason why lawyers would be any more immune to the causes that turn someone into an addict, are lawyers more prone to addiction?

The plural of anecdotes is not data (I know, but it’s still true). There are a lot of lawyers out there. Ten, one hundred, one thousand sad stories are sad, but don’t prove much. Nor do surveys add much to the mix:

Illicit drug use, however, is illegal. “I think the incidence of drug use and abuse is significantly underreported,” he said.

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