University of North Carolina law professor Carissa Byrne Hessick tells a very curious story in her new book, Punishment Without Trial: Why plea bargaining is a bad deal.” Carissa is in New York City to attend a criminal law conference at NYU, one I too was asked to speak at but begged off. She stayed a day extra in New York to spend with prolific twitter activist, Scott Hechinger, who took her to a Brooklyn criminal courtroom, where he schooled her.

“In this courtroom, the rule is no talking, no eating, no drinking, no using your cell phone, and no reading.” This message was delivered to me while I was sitting on a bench in a courtroom in Brooklyn one April morning. The message was delivered in a low voice by Scott Hechinger, an attorney with the Brooklyn Defender Services, who was sitting on the bench next to me.

“Why no reading?” I asked. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: The following is a guest post by Jessa Nicholson, partner at Nicholson Goetz & Otis in Madison, Wisconsin. Jessa’s post comes as an “in the trenches” view following the recent criticism of women defending men accused of sex offenses, as if a defense lawyer defending defendants of the wrong sort of crime was a traitor to her gender.

I had a draft of this guest post saved on my computer to send when I found myself arguing in opposition to the admission of “other acts” evidence in a campus sexual assault case I’m handling. I’m one of those women that sells out the sisterhood by defending people accused of sex crimes. Continue reading →

Is it cheating to have a family? Loving and supportive parents? After all, not everyone has one. In some cases, it’s a product of misfortune, a parent lost to disease or accident. In other cases, it’s a parent’s poor choices that give rise to their not being nuclear. And sometimes, the parent is there, but not very good at it and possibly really bad at parenting. So if you had good parents, a good and caring family, have you enjoyed a privilege that should be stripped from you to even the score in the name of equity?

Like White privilege, family privilege is an unacknowledged and unearned benefit instantiated in U.S. laws, policies, and practices and bestowed upon traditional or “standard” nuclear families to the disadvantage of non-traditional configured family systems (e.g., sole-parent families, unmarried committed partners rearing children together, grandparents raising grandchildren). Family privilege is defined as the benefits, often invisible and unacknowledged, that one receives by belonging to family systems long upheld in society as superior to all others. It serves to advantage certain family forms over others and is typically bestowed upon White, traditional nuclear families. Continue reading →

Not only did a protester who called herself “Blanca” follow Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema into the women’s room to exercise her right to express her grievance, but it was recorded for all to see and applaud.

Protesters followed Sen. Sinema into the bathroom at Arizona State University to confront her on Build Back Better and immigration pic.twitter.com/NDSmeu0h2M

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) October 3, 2021

Continue reading →

Every once in a while, some twit by a baby lawyer crosses my timeline. Often, it causes me to giggle in a pathetic sort of way because it’s largely incoherent, saying something that can only be deciphered by the young and hip. I am neither. But what can be discerned in these twits is that they’re working with a paradigm that’s foreign to my universe. They love people or they hate people. If the twit is about someone they love, they shower them with positivity, no matter how little it’s deserved. But if they hate the person, there isn’t a thing they can say or do that isn’t horrible. They could give the correct time of day, and it would still be wrong.

David French raises the results of a poll out of the University of Virginia that reflects a growing desire to break America into red and blue nations. Continue reading →

Standing in for a lawyer friend of mine at oral argument, I argued my case. From the audience, I heard the occasional “YES!” behind me, then “That RIGHT!” and other choice expressions of approval. When the prosecutor argued in response, there were outburts of “Bullshit” and “he’s lying.” The faces of the judges twisted with annoyance, until the presiding judge stated for the benefit of the audience that any further outbursts would not be tolerated.

After the argument, a woman walked up to me to tell me what a great job I did and how she was there to help. She was the one (one of the ones?) who lacked impulse control, but she believed that she was supporting me, helping my side, by adding in from the cheap seats her two cents because she wanted to help. I looked at her for moment, then said, “Do you have any idea how much damage your antics did to the case? This isn’t the way to persuade judges.” I walked over to the prosecutor, explained that I had no clue this would happen and apologized. Continue reading →

Debates can be fun and informative. And this one was both and neither.

So, our democracy is crumbling.  And the Supreme Court is the tool of choice for dismantling it.  To save our democracy, we must fix our broken Supreme Court by adding seats.

These were the opening words of Tamara Brummer, a labor organizer and director of national outreach for Demand Justice, a progressive organization dedicated to putting reliably biased judges on the bench. She was joined in the affirmative side by Dahlia Lithwick, who opened thus: Continue reading →

When everyone was in lockdown, but courts realized that trials were backing up, defendants  were sitting in jail, civil claims languished to litigants’ detriment, accommodations were made. Trial by Zoom became “a thing.” They weren’t trials as we understood them to be, with people facing each other, jurors observing witnesses’ demeanor, the ability to examine and cross in real life to make the liars squirm as they were revealed.

But it was the best we could do, and so judges and lawyers told each other lies that it was close enough to pretend it was a real trial. After all, there was a pandemic and we had to make due, even if due was due enough. Continue reading →

Happy Friday, everyone! Here’s to a great weekend, and checks calendar

Oh. It’s October. Joy of all joys.

I can’t begin to tell all of you how much your humble humorist cherishes the month of October. I’m practically over here jumping with joy. Continue reading →

The problem starts with reliability. When we’re given the official stats on police killings, we assume them to be accurate. After all, it’s not as if each of us, individually, can run around and investigate each death, and why would they lie, always the question for which no good answer exists. And yet, it happens, maybe not so much lies as in deliberate falsehoods, but less than full and accurate information.

Researchers say they’ve done the digging, plus some statistical extrapolation, and come to the realization that deaths at the hand of police have been under-reported. No, under-reported fails to capture the scope of what’s wrong here. The numbers are twice as bad as previously believed. Continue reading →