Vicki Baker didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t ask for or facilitate Wesley Little entering her house with a teenage girl, later released. She didn’t let him refuse to leave. She wasn’t even there. And yet, she, and she alone, will bear the cost of the police destroying her house, now that the Supreme Court has denied cert and allowed the Fifth Circuit’s ruling to stand.

The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment provides that private property shall not “be taken for public use, without just compensation.” This case raises an important question that has divided the courts of appeals: whether the Takings Clause requires compensation when the government damages private property pursuant to its police power.

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Some of you probably thought about this long ago, but it just clicked with me when I watched a segment on Discovery about how candy became connected to holidays. Back in the 1960s, television saturated American households. They said that between 1950 and 1960, households with televisions went from 8% to 89%. Whether that’s accurate or not, I don’t know, but even if the numbers are less than precise, the point was clear. Americans got their news from television, and there were only three networks, all of which told the same basic story.

What there wasn’t was cable news channels. What there wasn’t was journalists eschewing facts in favor of moral clarity. What there were not were channels dedicated to pushing one tribe’s narrative and denigrating the other’s. What there were not were viewers who watched the station that fed them what they wanted to hear, validated their priors and fed them “news” without regard to facts. Continue reading →

Dr. SJ hates bad food. We try to go to interesting restaurants with reputations for serving good food. Occasionally, a restaurant can be refreshingly inexpensive, but most “good” restaurants are quite pricey. Whether for good food or barely mediocre food, they charge as if they’re serving gold. And whether the dinner is fabulous or tasteless, the check eventually comes and demands to be paid.

Restaurants do not serve you dinner because they love you. They serve you dinner because you pay the tab.  It is a business transaction like any other. It may be framed in terms of love, as in food prepared with love and some personal connection between server and diner, but when dinner is over, you will still have paid and neither the server, hostess, chef, bartender nor cashier will be inviting you to their home for Thanksgiving. Continue reading →

In the normal course of affairs, sentencing follows upon a verdict of guilty like day after night. But then, the Supreme Court doesn’t stick its nose in between the two to issue a ruling as to presidential immunity. And then the defendant, now a convicted felon pending sentencing, isn’t elected President of the United States of America. Justice Juan Merchan is in uncharted territory, there being neither rules nor precedent to inform his next move.

What to do?

The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial has adjourned his sentencing, which was set for next week. Continue reading →

It doesn’t really matter how much you hate Jussie Smollet or what he did. Not even how it played into the lie that permeated the politics of the moment. It also doesn’t matter how much you hate Kim Foxx, or believe her office was corrupted by the politics of the moment. Like it or not, Smollett was a criminal defendant and Foxx the Cook County State’s Attorney.

And they made a deal.

The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday overturned the conviction of Jussie Smollett on charges he faked an anti-gay, anti-Black hate crime, saying the state made a deal with Smollett to drop the charges and it can’t renege on that agreement. Continue reading →

Trump went to town on Harris’ 2019 response to a question posed by the ACLU about whether  inmates should be given taxpayer-funded gender-transition surgery. Was her failure to address this “political malpractice”? 

Since Ms. Harris’s defeat, her campaign’s decision has landed in the center of a contentious debate over how large a role transgender issues played in her party’s losses around the country. Several prominent Democrats said Ms. Harris’s relative silence was a damaging concession to Mr. Trump — and evidence that the campaign was so out of step with Americans’ views that it did not appreciate the potency of the ads.

“Malpractice was committed by that campaign,” said Ed Rendell, a Democratic former governor of Pennsylvania and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

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Atop the list of reasons why Matt Gaetz, whom Trump calls the tip of his spear in an oblique reference to sexual comraderie, there is yet another reason. The guy’s so clueless as to use Venmo to pay off his “awesome” women.

ABC News previously reported that House investigators had subpoenaed Venmo for Gaetz’s records and had been showing them to witnesses, asking if they were for sex or drugs. The Venmo records totaling over $10,000 in payments were shown to the witnesses, who testified that some of the payments were from Gaetz and were for sex, a source familiar with the investigation told ABC News.

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I remember all too well when Twitter came on the scene, threatening the hegemony of the blogosphere as the means by which ordinary folk were able to put thoughts in writing for a broad array of other ordinary folk to read. In the early days, some tried to call it “micro-blogging,” as if to trade off the popularity of the blogosphere by framing it as blogging for people with extremely short attention spans.

In the beginning, I refused to believe it had legs.

Seriously, who has the time for this?  Who cares?  If you want to know what’s going on in the life of the people you care about, speak to them.  Can’t you see the kid with the crackberry flipping back and forth between Facebook and twitter and blogs and email, all while you’re sitting there trying to have a conversation.  He’s living online and ignoring the real person in front of him.  This is progress?

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Anybody want another post about why Harris blew it and Darth Cheeto is a vulgar, deceitful, narcissistic ignoramus? I didn’t think so. Lord knows the ubiquitous post mortems on the election and the four horsemenpeople of the cabinet have beaten it to death.

Having already said all I have to say on these subjects, I’ve got nothing today. So I’m going to try something different and make this an open thread for any subject that you want to discuss, provided it’s not about politics. Maybe nobody has anything else to comment about, which would be fine. It would be great if you keep your pet conspiracy theories, partisan lies and spin and other assorted craziness to yourself.

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One of the things that non-lawyers were often incapable of grasping was the ability of criminal defense lawyers to separate their zealous representation of clients who committed egregious acts from the conduct itself. How, people regularly argued, could you defend a heinous murderer without being a supporter of the heinous murders they committed? After all, if the crimes were appalling, then defending those who committed those crimes was no less appalling, no less supportive of their commission than those who actually committed heinous crimes.

Nah. We defend because defending the accused is a critical part of the system that distinguishes between the guilty and the innocent, that holds the government to its burden and makes certain that the person accused, no matter how heinous the accusation, has been afforded the protections our system requires and has been proven, beyond a reasonable doubt and upon only competent and admissible evidence, to be guilty. Without this, the system fails and trust in the system, which is more important than the conviction of any individual no matter how heinous their crimes, fails. Continue reading →