From the cries of outrage on social media, you would have believed that two NYPD officers shot a man because he failed to pay the subway fare. The problem was that the man, Derrell Mickles, not only tried to beat the fare, twice, but had a knife in his hand which he refused to drop when the cops commanded he do so. That little detail was omitted by those trying to whip up outrage over the shooting.

[A longer video is available as well.] Continue reading →

A thought experiment. You have 100 feet of shelving in a public library and 1,000 feet of books, with more coming every day. What do you, the librarian, do? You pick and choose which books to put on your shelf and use up your precious shelf space. It’s not because you’re a censor or book-hater, but because the laws of physics apply in libraries and two objects cannot occupy the same space.

In libe parlance, the problem is called “weeding.”

I want to talk about a particular twist in the dispute, which can be particularly well seen in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Freedom to Read Foundation, the Texas Library Association, and American Library Association. The passage, and the sources it cites, refer to the necessity to remove books on some criteria—this is called “weeding,” and some sources suggest that each year a public library would generally weed out 5% of its stock—and discuss which criteria are proper: Continue reading →

District of Maryland Judge Paula Xinis denied a motion to dismiss as to a school district’s “official” twitter “StaffPride” account. Why, you may wonder, would a school district have an official Pride account. That was at the heart of the matter.

In October 2022, the School Board announced the introduction of LGBTQIA+-themed books into the MCPS [Montgomery County Public Schools] curriculum. In response, several parents sought permission from MCPS for their children to “opt out” of any classroom instruction involving these books. Continue reading →

For most of us, the only time we consider the propriety of a sentence is when it applies to some outlier conviction we read about in the funny pages. What never quite makes it to our radar is the tens of thousands of mundane convictions of defendants whose names mean nothing beyond their families, friends and, in some cases, victims. At the moment of sentence, a process that’s primarily voodoo as an honest judge might admit, passions are strong and consequences taken seriously.

But what about 20 years later? Continue reading →

The video was more than enough for most people to conclude that the inexplicably unnamed Riverside County Sheriff’s Deputy was not merely wrong, but substantively no different than any other home invader. Others saw the potential for gaps in the context that might somehow make the deputy look less offensive, and so manufactured background facts the might exculpate the deputy or at least raised questions.

The contextual facts, however, were of little help to the deputy. They only made him look worse.

According to the video, a minor answered the door after the deputy rang the bell. Captions in the video say the minor closed the door after seeing the deputy, only for the deputy to open the door and let himself in. Continue reading →

To a criminal defense lawyer, confidentiality is a core value. It is, for lack of a less religious word, sacred. We know things. We learn things. We possess information that would be of extreme interest to others, whether at a cocktail party or in the courthouse hallway. We have great stories that would fascinate friends and acquaintances alike.

The information is often about people we dislike, maybe even despise, and revealing it will do great harm to people we would love to harm And yet, we will take our stories to our grave. At least I will. Continue reading →

An old-school union-busting gambit is to threaten employees that if they vote for a union, management will shut the business down and they will be out of work. What good is a union going to do for you if you have no jobs, they would argue. And this was an unfair labor practice under the Wagner Act, which protects the rights of workers to unionize without retaliation.

But Starbucks didn’t threaten to close three stores in Ithaca, New York. It closed three stores. Shut the doors. Took out its barista machines. Locked the doors. It claimed it was because the stores were unprofitable and had high management turnover. But an NLRB Administrative Law Judge found that it was just to bust the union in violation of Section 7. Continue reading →

There is little question that Scott Hayes, a pro-Israel protester and Iraq war veteran, was the victim of a forceful attack by an apparently pro-Palestinian passerby. The video leaves no doubt.

🚨BREAKING🚨

A man wearing a Palestinian pin was shot in the stomach this evening after he charged through traffic and tackled a pro-Israel Iraq war veteran in Newton, Massachusetts.pic.twitter.com/Ix5JEJaJNp

— Kassy Akiva (@KassyAkiva) September 13, 2024

In the course, Hayes fired his lawfully carried gun and shot the attacker. Continue reading →

This campus admissions season was the first under the new rule of SSFA v. Harvard, banning the use of racial preferences in admissions. Predictions of disaster permeated the campus debates. After all, without racial preferences, how would colleges fulfill their self-imposed goals of diversity, equity and inclusion? While some colleges desperately sought ways to circumvent, even ignore, the law, others complied. Did the sky fall?

The percentage of Black freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, declined from 15 percent last fall to 5 percent for this fall. At Amherst College the number fell from 11 percent to 3 percent. Other schools have reported less precipitous but still noticeable drops, such as from 18 percent to 14 percent at Harvard, 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a taxpayer-supported public university in a state where 23 percent of the population is Black — and 15 percent to 9 percent at Brown University, a school that has spent considerable energy looking at its early ties to the slave trade. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady, but an overall trend is clear.

Continue reading →

On trial, I never refer to my client as “the defendant.” He’s Joe Smith, or whatever his name happens to be, because I want the jury to see him as a human being. Whether this makes a real difference to the jury is unclear. It’s one of a thousand things that happen at trial, and there is no metric to figure out whether it helps. The best I can argue is it can’t hurt, and there’s no downside to doing so. So why not?

Pamela Paul argues that the trend to euphemism, to vilifying one word as stigmatizing and replacing it with more words, has a cost. She has a point. Or two. Continue reading →