Police officer Jason Rivera, 22, had only been on the NYPD since November, 2020. Barely enough time to scuff his service belt. Lashawn McNeil, 47, shot him and killed him. The first question was why, and it took reading through 12 insipid paragraphs in the New York Times to find out.

Three officers answered a 911 call from a woman who said she was fighting with her son. When the officers arrived at the apartment, they were met by the woman and a second son. There was no indication from the 911 call, officials said, that there were weapons in the apartment. Continue reading →

Sheriff Roy Templeton was in fourth grade. Again. The irony was not lost on Mud Lick’s top cop, who spent many a day dealing with adults who behaved like fourth graders.

Today was different. The Sheriff had been summoned to Bear Bryant Elementary School at the request of Ms. Furstenburger, Roy Junior’s fourth grade teacher. Apparently the boy’d been up to some mischief and the Sheriff had been summoned to deal with his son’s behavior. Continue reading →

There are different types of dirty cops. There are the ones who steal from people. There are the ones who use their shields to trade sex for a break. There are the ones who coerce confessions. There are the ones who just lie. The system was never crafted to deal with dirty cops, expecting cops to be honest and trustworthy, and thus entrusting them with a gun, a badge and the authority to do massive harm to human beings in the name of The People.

The irony is that it can be impossible to distinguish the good cop from the bad, not just because we can’t see what they’re doing but because they can be the same person. Cops are funny that way. Today’s hero on the news was callous and brutal to some poor guy yesterday. Continue reading →

It has no traffic light, and the only commercial enterprise in town is a Dollar Store, which is still a bit pricey for the residents of Brookside, Alabama.

Brookside until recently was known for its quirky Russian food festival and the state’s only onion-domed Russian Orthodox Church. It’s a former mining town, its population about the same as it was a decade ago. Fewer than 100 of its residents graduated college.

Brookside is a poor town, 70% white, 21% Black, with a small but growing Hispanic population and a median income well below the state average. The town survives on the fringes of Birmingham with tax revenue from the Dollar General, which forms the totality of its commercial district.

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Much as we’re understanding drug addiction, as a stand alone state, to be a health problem, the need to get the next fix causes people to do terrible things. Patrick Baker, 43, did something terrible.

Posing as a United States marshal, Mr. Baker killed Donald L. Mills Jr. during a home invasion in May 2014, the U.S. attorney’s office said. Mr. Mills’s wife and children were held at gunpoint while Mr. Baker ransacked the home for oxycodone pills, the office said.

In 2017, Baker was convicted in Kentucky state court of reckless homicide and robbery, and sentenced to 19 years in prison. His incarceration didn’t last long. Continue reading →

The purpose of Emily’s List is about as clear as it gets.

OUR MISSION

We elect Democratic pro-choice women to office.

Three criteria for funding in one concise sentence, that they be Democrats, pro-choice and female. Fair enough. This is the glory of our American democracy, that you can support candidates for the reasons that matter to you, good or bad, and Emily’s List has its reasons. Continue reading →

When the news broke, it was unsurprising that Above The Law’s Kathryn Rubino, whose only cognizable legal skill is brutally vapid snark, seized upon it. After all, it had all the makings of a salacious story at the new, woke ATL, the smart, witty ATL birthed by David Lat having long since been murdered in the name of selling advertisements and gaining the eyeballs of the woke T14 kids.

There was a conservative law student, and she was a RACIST!!! Well, at least that’s what someone said.

I’d say Crystal Clanton just keeps failing upwards, but given that outrage is currency in right-wing circles, it is more accurate to say that her career is progressing on schedule. Do you remember why Clanton first became a news story? It’s been a minute, so I’ll cover the deets. 

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Ed. Note: Chris Halkides has been kind enough to try to make us lawyers smarter by dumbing down science enough that we have a small chance of understanding how it’s being used to wrongfully convict and, in some cases, execute defendants. Chris graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and teaches biochemistry, organic chemistry, and forensic chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

When we think of screening tests for drugs, roadside or airport seizures come to mind. However, a great deal of testing is also performed involving incarcerated individuals, both for consumed and seized drugs. In January, the New York State Office of the Inspector General issued a report on a scandal involving the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which had been using tests from the Microgenics Corporation. Continue reading →

There was a time when the Senate was known as the world’s greatest deliberative body, dignified and invariably courteous, unlike the 435 dirty groundlings who squabbled ceaselessly in the House of Representatives. And then it ended with partisan political paralysis, putting party above country and preferring games to compromise.

While the issue of the moment is voting legislation, the “fix” is the filibuster. An invented procedure, with a somewhat tainted history of changes from the number needed for cloture to the mechanics of reading the phonebook while praying for strong bladder control, it has a point. If a simple majority was sufficient to impose fundamental change on a nation, it would empower a majority of one to tyranny. Continue reading →

President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law on August 6, 1965. It was a revolutionary law, as there is no such thing as a national election. Every state runs its own election, including its own representatives, senators and presidential electors, to send to Washington to do its bidding, so the federal government had no role in the mechanics of state elections until then.

Martin Luther King pushed Johnson to make it the federal government’s business because states were affirmatively preventing black people, called Negroes at the time by polite society, from registering and voting. Continue reading →