In a surprisingly insipid post, L.D. Burnett attempts to rebut Nick Grossman’s Arc Digital post that the damage done following the utterance of a racial epithet in a three-second snapchat failed to recognize that young people’s lives shouldn’t be ruined for the poor decisions that are emblematic of children. Considering that Burnett’s writing is usually thoughtful, this was disappointing, as was her reaction to criticism.

But considering her very progressive stance, this stood out above the myriad other failings of her argument:

But committing racist acts without expecting to face serious consequences is not a sign of immaturity; it is a symptom of assumed impunity.

Continue reading →

If you’re reading this, congratulations. We did it. We survived 2020. It’s worth celebrating.

While I’m sure most of us would love to relegate 2020 to the dust bin of history, it’s important we take a moment to appreciate how batshit insane the year was and give it true justice by making fun of the weirdness.

The only problem with doing a proper 2020 year in review is the sheer volume of material. So much happened in the last year some weeks flew by in minutes. So if a particular item of interest isn’t here, feel free to let us know in the comments. Let’s get started. Cast your minds back to… Continue reading →

To non-lawyers, the threat of suing carries some inexplicable weight. Do this or we’ll sue, they exclaim. Lawyers shrug. Sue away, we think, because so what? Will that be the reaction of whoever is making decisions at the University of Rhode Island to the cries of their activist students?

“Some Black, White and Latino students shall join in another class action lawsuit if the next URI President is not an African-American with an ancestry to slavery,” read the list of demands put out by the Diversity Think Tank at the University of Rhode Island. Continue reading →

If years had names, perhaps 2020 would be called “The Reckoning,” as the word was ubiquitous, used promiscuously to contend that people of privilege had to come to grips with the suffering endured by those without. It was a time to “settle accounts,” we were told, as guys were sent out to collect by breaking kneecaps or burning down random people’s businesses.

The cops needed a reckoning for their treatment of black and brown people. White people needed a reckoning for their privileged life, even if it wasn’t remotely privileged, on the backs of a pyramid of the oppressed, even if they weren’t remotely oppressed. All in all, there was a lot of damage done with very little to show for it. Continue reading →

When Dr. SJ and I married, the year 2020 was so far in the future that it was the Jetsons. Flying cars. A colorblind society. Everyone wore unitards and was healthy and happy until the age 100. Never would we have imagined it would be a pandemic and a president named Trump. It would have been as ludicrous as WAP becoming our national anthem.

Things didn’t turn out as anticipated. Things rarely do. It makes for interesting times. Continue reading →

In the fantasy world of defund police, a 7-year-old black girl doesn’t die from a bullet to the back of her head. Atlanta isn’t a fantasy world.

The random shooting death of a 7-year-old girl in Atlanta has prompted a coalition of politicians, police and businesses to ramp up calls to establish a private security force to supplement the Atlanta Police Department.

Seven year old Kennedy Maxie was fatally shot on Dec. 21 shortly after she had finished Christmas shopping with her family at the Phipps Plaza mall in Buckhead, an affluent residential and commercial neighborhood in Uptown Atlanta.

Continue reading →

It was somewhat surprising that a post about a 3-second Snapchat would go out into the wild, but it captured much of what’s at issue in the culture war. It wasn’t posted for shock value, or to demonstrate who was more culpable. To the extent blame was directed at anyone, it was the grownups.

First, the New York Times for publishing an article that framed the matter to valorize the young man who deliberately harmed a young woman, whose word choice was immature at best and offensive at worst, who intended harm to no one. Second, the University of Tennessee who succumbed to the shrieking of the mob by ousting her from matriculation. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

I don’t doubt Christopher Young’s sincerity when he wrote his op-ed in the New York Post. He says he is a progressive, and I don’t doubt it. He’s certainly not the only police officer who thinks that the War on Drugs is a failure, wants reform in other areas, etc. He then lists four police myths that he wants to debunk. The problem is that he’s wrong. My old mean-ass editor wrote about it and it’s good. It’s just not from the cop standpoint. Continue reading →

I appreciate Akiva Cohen. If he didn’t drudge through the nonsense suit filed by Rep. Louie Gohmert, et al., against Vice President Michael Pence, I might have felt compelled to, and I don’t want to. Having read some of the Trump election suit papers, and the shredding by Mike Dunford, I’ve suffered enough.

The crux of the suit*? 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.

Patricia Stallings took her infant son Ryan to the hospital because of lethargy, vomiting and other symptoms. The hospital tested Ryan’s blood and found what it believed to be evidence of ethylene glycol and metabolic acidosis (his blood was too acidic). The key ingredient of antifreeze, ethylene glycol, produces low pH and can be fatal when it is ingested and metabolized into oxalate, which forms crystals with calcium ion in the brain and kidneys. Continue reading →