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.

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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 →

Seattle police detective, and former soldier, Christopher Young, begins by Gertruding to establish that he’s not just one of those bad cops and consequently easily dismissed.

As a progressive who wants to decriminalize drugs and advance the welfare state, I fit in well in my Pacific Northwest community. Except, that is, for my job: I’ve been a big-city cop here for 26 years. Before that, I served in the military. The raging #DefundthePolice movement doesn’t know me and my colleagues at all — and persistent myths about police and their critics do more harm than good.

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It was a 3-second Snapchat video made by a 15-year-old freshman who was excited to get her learner’s permit and sent privately to a friend. It would end up a catastrophe for Mimi Groves, but not by chance.

Ms. Groves had originally sent the video, in which she looked into the camera and said, “I can drive,” followed by the slur, to a friend on Snapchat in 2016, when she was a freshman and had just gotten her learner’s permit. It later circulated among some students at Heritage High School, which she and Mr. Galligan attended, but did not cause much of a stir.

Galligan was offended when he saw it. It wasn’t directed toward him, but it somehow wound its way around the school and ultimately onto his phone. Continue reading →