Gaming venue is a time-honored endeavor for lawyers. Who doesn’t try to find the most amenable court possible to pursue their claim? Of course, courts don’t always play along, sending you back to where you should have been in the first place, if not dismissing your case as a reminder that games have losers. And now Congress wants in on the action.

Court picking is when Congress uses its authority over federal-court jurisdiction to stuff politically sensitive cases from throughout the country into one court that leans its way, to be buried there for as long as possible. Court-picking’s evil genius is its stealth. Americans would notice four new justices, but not changes to technocratic statutes that excite only civil-procedure professors. Despite featuring in Congress’s most radioactive bill—the so-called For the People Act, or H.R.1, which would transform elections and limit Americans’ rights to speak about them—court-picking has escaped notice.

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Did you hear about the horrible racist stop of Juanisha Brooks? It was just a routine traffic stop in Virginia, with no one hurt, not even prosecuted, but still it made the New York Times because it proved systemic racism and people must know what happened.

Two troopers stopped Ms. Brooks, 34, around 2:21 a.m. after following her car past roughly two or three exits on the Capitol Beltway. According to a police report, her taillights were not turned on, she had twice followed “too close” to surrounding vehicles and she had failed to signal when changing lanes.

During the stop, Ms. Brooks said in an interview on Tuesday, the trooper who approached her did not tell her why she was being pulled over even though she asked repeatedly.

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In the early days of the pandemic, the conflicts quickly emerged. People were arrested but not arraigned because there were no judges sitting on benches to do so. They were detained but not indicted because there were no grand juries to hear the case. They remained in jail awaiting trial but not tried, because the courts were shut down and there were no juries. Bit by bit, adjustments were made, from conducting trials over Zoom to masked and socially distanced jurors.

On the one hand, having a defendant sit in jail because the system shut down was a disaster, particularly when the length of time awaiting the system to ramp up sufficiently to at least address the poor guy’s incarceration could easily exceed any punishment that might follow. On the other hand, the adjustments made were, to be blunt, inadequate. Zoom trials? Masked  witnesses and jurors? Was this good enough to satisfy due process? After all, we might be in the midst of a pandemic, but did that mean constitutional protections for defendants were suspended while the wheels of the system continued to grind? Continue reading →

When I saw the title of Elizabeth Bruenig’s op-ed, I skipped over it. My child-having and rearing days are long behind me, and while the love-hate relationship between Millennial parents and  their children over who gets to be the center of attention may fascinate them, it doesn’t do much for me. But that was a mistake on my part, because I read the headline through Boomer eyes, not realizing that there is nothing so banal, not even the decision to have children, that can’t be twisted into a culture war battle.

Millennial women in the United States are waiting longer than any generation in recorded history to have children, a trend that’s raised the rate of births among 30-somethings to a 50-year high. They didn’t start the trend, but they’ve taken it to new heights. “While slightly more than half (53 percent) of women in their early 40s in 1994 had become mothers by age 24,” one 2018 data analysis published by the Pew Research Center observed, “this share was 39 percent among those who were in this age group in 2014.” Yesterday’s geriatric is today’s “Juno.”

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Medical science can keep us alive well beyond our expiration date. That was what my father told me when he was in his 90s, a message I understood. He was alive, as long as breathing was all one wanted from life, but he struggled to walk, to remember names, to manage his personal hygiene. The problem was that he knew he was failing, his life pretty much sucked, but there he was, waking up every morning anyway. He wasn’t about to do anything to change the status quo, but when it came, he was ready and it was fine with him. He remembered what it was like to be able to enjoy life.

As the population ages, and it is indeed aging thanks to medical science’s ability to keep blood pumping if no other part of our anatomy, the need for care becomes increasingly problematic. First, caring for the elderly isn’t exactly a fun job, even if they can be cute at times. Their needs are constant. Senile dementia isn’t as adorable as they make it look in the movies. They can be downright unpleasant and demanding, often quite offensive without being entirely responsible for what they say and do. Who wants a job like that? Continue reading →

Bentlee and Rodney Herbert, 8 and 5 years of age, went to school. So far, so good. They wore t-shirts. Fine as well. There was writing on their t-shirts. Nothing odd about that. Yet, the school’s principal, Denise Brunk, told Bentlee to turn his shirt inside out for the day, and not to wear it again.

On Monday, Ms. Herbert went to the school to ask the principal what dress-code policy her son had violated, Ms. Herbert said. Ms. Brunk referred her to the Ardmore City Schools superintendent, Kim Holland.

“He told me when the George Floyd case blew up that politics will not be allowed at school,” Ms. Herbert said on Friday, referring to Mr. Holland. “I told him, once again, a ‘Black Lives Matter’ T-shirt is not politics.”

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One mother failed her child, for which a cop gets blamed. One mother loved her child, for which cops get blamed. If you squint hard enough, believe hard enough, deny hard enough and grasp tightly the vision of a future where unicorns, left to their own devices, will merrily prance on rainbows rather than pull out a gun in the Disneyfied Times Square and shoot three random tourists, including a 4-year-old, maybe you can believe this is all the product of externalities. Nothing one does is one’s fault. There is no choice. No agency. No responsbility. What use is government if it can’t protect you from yourself, you friends, your mother?

And what use is government if it can’t protect you from itself? Continue reading →

Anybody crying over an elected prosecutor getting bad press? One person is, and that’s the prosecutor. Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby.

@FOXBaltimore’s blatantly slanted,dishonest,misleading,racist, and extremely dangerous coverage must come to end. Last year, they ran 248 stories about me and and my office, while WJZ ran 46, WBAL ran 26 and WMAR ran 10 during that year.

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“Vince McMahon is going to jail for dealing steroids,” my friend Andy told me one day at school.

We were kids. Neither of us knew what steroids were. We knew drugs were bad, and the guy who everyone said ran the WWF was being accused of dealing them.

What no one knew was the acquittal of Vince McMahon in what would later be called “The Steroid Trial” helped shape the face of professional wrestling for decades to come. Although it’s easy to look back now and see this as a monumental fuck-up of a federal case, few people realize Vince had an old rival holed up in Stamford, Connecticut in case of a guilty verdict to smooth over the transfer of power within the top American wrestling promotion at the time. Continue reading →

They’re just lawyers who get a paycheck from the government. They’re still lawyers subject to the Code of Professional Responsibility. They’re lawyers, and as lawyers, are subject to the Code of Professional Responsibility. So why is it that the Departmental Disciplinary Committees and their lead counsel have essentially ignored any grievances over their conduct?

Years ago, my buddy and officemate at the time, Dan Arshack, as president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, when it still mattered, created a committee to grieve prosecutors and judges. It was created to overcome one of the biggest obstacles, that these were people we would have to deal with over and over. There is no faster way to make an enemy for life than filing a grievance against someone, and so defense lawyers were reluctant to do so in their own name. Plus, it usually came off as vengeful, sour grapes at times or just petty. Continue reading →