One of the most profound concepts is that any time you enact a law or regulation that involves a police interaction, it could result in a person’s execution. Is it worthy of execution? Did New York City Mayor Bill deBlasio ask himself that question before coming up with this brilliant idea?

Those who commit hateful but noncriminal conduct should be confronted by the NYPD, @NYCMayor @BilldeBlasio says:

“I assure you, if an NYPD officer calls you or shows up at your door to ask about something you did, that makes people think twice, and we need that.”

— Matthew Chayes (@chayesmatthew) March 18, 2021

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Few people today give much thought to how astoundingly far beyond the contours of American understanding of governmental power the 1964 Civil Rights Act went. Here was a law that told people, businesses, whom they must hire, whom they must serve, how they must disregard their own ideas and feelings in the conduct of their private businesses because the government commanded them to do so.

Of course, there may be no one who would question that the law was salutory, serving a far higher and better purpose than the banal notion that our personal right to conduct business with whomever we choose, hire and fire whomever we choose and serve whomever we choose. What about our personal freedom? Ending discrimination was more important, and so government crossed a line of dictating how individuals and business would conduct themselves, even if government stretched its authority to the breaking point. Continue reading →

Ed. note: Anatole France wrote “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” But when it comes to federal prosecutions, is wealth always an advantage or can it also be a detriment? 

The following post, by my former Fault Lines colleague, Atlanta’s Andrew Fleischman, is the first in a series of posts debating with Miami’s David Oscar Markus the issue, “Is Rich Law better than Poor Law?”

David Oscar Markus recently wrote an editorial on behalf of his clients, the family of Ghislaine Maxwell, in which he said that “the rich do not enjoy enormous advantages in a federal criminal case.”¹ If anything, they are greatly disadvantaged.” I’d love to live in a world where this was true. But justice ain’t cheap, and the tools a criminal defendant needs to rebut the presumption of guilt our system heaps upon them often require significant investment.

First off, there’s choosing the correct lawyer. Justice Roberts was not exaggerating when he wrote that a defendant’s inability to pay for their counsel of choice “raises substantial concerns about the fairness of the entire proceeding.” Continue reading →

Georgia’s new Trump-elected senator, Rev. Raphael Warnock, gave his first floor speech to the United States Senate, and it was a doozy. Unsurprisingly, he spoke in support of the Senate version of H.R. 1, the House’s attempt to usurp state control over their voter rules in reaction to some state’s efforts to rein in changes that facilitated voting in the last election.

“We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,” Warnock said, pointing to a wave of bills that limit voting in Republican-controlled states like Arizona and his own Georgia. “This is Jim Crow in new clothes.”

He went on: Continue reading →

MARCH 18, 2021
4:45 AM

Deputy Ernesto Miranda and Patrolman Ray Stevens quietly entered the dimly lit bullpen of the Mud Lick Sheriff’s Department. Both men were, to put it charitably, extremely hung over.

It wasn’t as if this was unexpected. The night before, both men attended the Grassy Knoll Pub’s “Irish Day” celebration, where the citizens of Mud Lick, like many Americans, used the holiday to get stinking drunk and pretend to be Irish.

Miranda moved through the office quietly, turning on lights, booting up his desk computer and starting a pot of coffee. Stevens, a new transfer, crashed into a file cabinet. Continue reading →

Many have wondered what the rationalization could be when “survivor” advocates complain that the new Title IX rules make it too hard for “victims” to accuse male students of sexual misconduct. The answer isn’t hard to state: it’s that accusers feel burdened by the potential of being put to the test of proving the truthfulness of their claims. If they’re simply believed without question, they feel no such burden.

If they’re required to prove their accusation, or even worse, challenged by the accused, the trauma of their victimization will be multiplied, their pain re-inflicted, and so they will be more reluctant to come forward. Accordingly, their rationalization goes, the perpetrator of their sexual wrong will not be taken to task and will be free to inflict his maleness on other unaware women. Continue reading →

The lawyers defending Coastal Carolina University were proud enough of their win in the first ever Title IX trial, getting a defendant’s verdict, that they wrote it up within days for their .

Jim Gilliam and Hunter Freeman successfully represented Coastal Carolina University in a five-day federal jury trial involving Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. While plaintiff was a student at the University, a female student accused the male plaintiff of sexual assault. The University followed its policies in conducting an investigation and engaging in the student-disciplinary process. Ultimately, the student-disciplinary process found plaintiff in violation of the University’s policies and permanently dismissed the plaintiff from the University. Continue reading →

Part of Shawn Thomason’s argument on appeal of his stalking conviction and upward departure at sentence was prosecutorial misconduct of an unusual nature.

Second, Thomason argues that his conviction must be vacated because the prosecution engaged in misconduct by referring to him with masculine pronouns and with “stereotypes” like “gunman” and “boyfriend.” He also contends that the prosecution ignored his diagnosis of gender dysphoria by claiming that the women’s clothing found in his car was for JNS when the record showed that Thomason sometimes wears women’s clothing.

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The House voted to reauthorize the lapsed Violence Against Women Act ((VAWA), which maintains that curious name given how much of the domestic violence is purports to address is committed by women as well as men. The political angle of the bill is to make it unpalatable to gun-rights activists and politicians by “closing” what Democrats call the “boyfriend loophole,” thereby enabling Dems to claim that Reps don’t care about women when their problem with the amended bill is the law’s extension of the forfeiture of Second Amendment rights to men convicted of misdemeanor “domestic abuse and stalking” to boyfriends as well as spouses.

The most contentious issue in the House-passed bill is a provision that expands the criminal threshold to bar an individual from buying a gun to include misdemeanor convictions of domestic abuse or stalking. It would also close the so-called boyfriend loophole to expand the definition of who is affected by existing gun prohibitions to include dating partners. “This legislation makes it clear that Democrats consider gun ownership a second-class right,” said Rep. Bob Good, R-Va.

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The explanation given way back when for the “reasonable person” standard is that people can only be judged by an objective standard of reasonableness. After all, there is always somebody who is so fragile, so delicate, so easily outraged that they will lose it over anything or find cause to be traumatized if that’s what they’re inclined to be. But that can’t possibly work for a society, since people cannot guide their conduct in accordance with the most fragile person alive, right?

Maybe not any more. Continue reading →