The Washington Post broke the story, but since WaPo lives behind its paywall, it gets no link love. New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has impaneled a special grand jury, as distinguished from the ordinary grand jury panels which deal with ordinary cases, directed specifically on something to do with Trump.

What that may be remains unclear, but the fact that Cy chose to announce that he was impaneling a grand jury, as opposed to announcing that a grand jury returned an indictment against, well, some entity, is a curious play. It comes on top of NY’s intrepid press-conference holder, Letitia James’ announcement that her office will be working with Cy’s office. Continue reading →

There is a real and significant difference between the harm done by criminals and the harm done by police. The former are called “criminals” because they commit crimes, engage in wrongful conduct and do harm. The latter are theoretically our protectors, authorized by law, armed by our choice, to prevent criminals from doing harm. Our expectations, our demands, are different and they should be. There is no comparison.

But that doesn’t meant that the harm done by criminals is neither harm nor devastating.

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Not that I haven’t fallen into this trap before. Like others, I blindly jumped on the bandwagon when the UVA rape case went public in Rolling Stone and I bit. It was a lie and I fell for it because I chose to fall for it. Not my proudest moment. Confirmation bias is a powerful drug, particularly when the risk of questioning, even taking a “wait and see” approach, is tantamount to being an apologist for the other team.

But the story out of Boise State was just the sort of thing that people believed would happen when academic ideologues pushed critical race theory, and so when the story broke, it proved their point and they grabbed it. Continue reading →

My tolerance for twitter arguments is very limited, as they tend to swiftly devolve into either ad hominem, idiocy or dive down rabbit holes. That latter is what happened in a thread I read recently involving Wesley Lowery, Ben Smith and David Menschel, which I would link in all its glory but much of it seems to have vanished. By much of it, I mean Lowery’s twits, which were the more interesting ones.

Lowery remains of the view that objectivity in reporting is a myth, and that there is no such thing as an objective report. On that, he may be generally right, as we all carry biases and they are reflected in everything from our choice of what to write about to our choice of adjectives. But the next leg of his argument is where he goes astray. Because no one is objective, journalists should reject the notion of objective reporting, admit to their biases and indulge them. Or to put it in clearer context, if a reporter can’t be perfectly objective, then why even try to be objective at all? Continue reading →

There’s a catchphrase, “criminalizing poverty,” which can mean many things. When fines and costs are imposed on defendants who walk into court destitute, the end result is a foregone conclusion. You can’t get blood from a rock, and they are rocks. When they fail to pay, not necessarily because they laugh at the law but because they’re broke, they get rounded up and put in jail as punishment for not paying. That’s criminalizing poverty.

Then there’s the other kind.

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The “Reasonably Scared Cop Rule” has inexplicably morphed from a defense in §1983 cases into a justification defense in prosecutions of cops for engaging in conduct that would be criminal if committed by anyone other than a cop. There are arguments to be made, that we place a different expectation, if not legal duty, on cops to act in the face of violence when non-cops would run away, but that’s not really much of an answer. They have no duty to shoot and they’re no more entitled to commit crimes than anyone else.

The kicker to the rule is its twisted use of the word “reasonable,” as it’s not what you, I or a jury deems reasonable, but what a trained police officer under the particular circumstances would deem reasonable. Since we’re not cops, we aren’t qualified to answer that question, and instead rely on experts in police training and tactics to tell us whether it’s reasonable. Experts like Bill Lewinski, who never met a use of force that was excessive. Experts like cop turned prawf, Seth Stoughten, who testified against Derek Chauvin. Continue reading →

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.

Not all DNA evidence is of equal weight; the presence or absence of a body fluid for which forensic tests are commonly available (blood, semen, and saliva) is a critical factor. We will examine two kinds of misunderstandings which have appeared. Continue reading →

After being elected as mayor of Chicago under the banner of gay black female progressive, Lori Lightfoot learned the hard way that identity cred only works as long as your every decision backs the tribe. As BLM protests, riots and looting threatened to leave her as mayor of the devastation formerly known as Chicago, she raised the bridges and sent out the riot troops. Despite all her victim points, she failed the team, and the team let her know it by going directly after her.

What’s a black female mayor to do?

In a letter sent Wednesday to local media, Lightfoot argued that the overwhelming maleness and Whiteness of Chicago’s press corps — in a city where roughly two-thirds of the residents are people of color — did not adequately reflect the population and was a detriment to local media coverage. Continue reading →

Millions of Americans and their authoritarian elected leaders reacted in shock and disbelief when Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s appointed Public Health Jesus by the mainstream media, announced alongside the CDC that fully vaccinated people no longer have to wear masks in most public settings.

The sudden reversal in policy prompted many to question if this was Fauci indeed. Continue reading →

Much as the meaning of the word “rape” has been so diluted as to reduce many accusations into excuses, that doesn’t mean rape doesn’t happen. And when it does, and it does, it is a heinous offense that compels investigation and prosecution. But what if a prosecutor refuses to pursue it? If you’re in Kansas, there is an alternative.

For three years, the local prosecutor has resolutely refused to make [Madison Smith’s] case: that what began as consensual sex in a college dorm room became a rape, and that she was unable to say “stop” because her classmate was strangling her.

It’s not that the local prosecutor ultimately did nothing. He eventually pursued a charge of felony aggravated battery and the defendant was convicted. But that wasn’t enough. That wasn’t rape. Continue reading →