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.

When there is a police involved shooting, it is a common practice for the prosecutor to present the case to a grand jury, and to let them make the decision on whether to charge the officer(s) or not. It provides cover for both the prosecutor and the police, as the proceedings are secret. The grand jury either indicts or no bills the officer(s), and they are either prosecuted, or not. The public is happy, the police are happy, and the prosecutor is happy.

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In an unfortunate, if typical, disconnect, Staci Zaretsky notes that while law school graduates are finally getting jobs at the rate they did before the 2007 recession, black law school graduates are left out of the good news.

[T]he number of graduates employed in full-time, long-term jobs where bar passage was required was 74.3 percent (an increase of more than 3 percentage points), a percentage higher than rates measured before the recession. It’s actually the highest level ever recorded.

This is great, and frankly surprising in light of the pandemic, news. But this great news doesn’t extend to everyone. Continue reading →

Whether to separate children from parents as they cross over the border, whether claiming asylum or not, is a complicated question, although the arguments in favor of separation as anything other than a deliberately cruel method of creating a disincentive to enter the United States are overwhelming. These are children, for crying out loud. You can hate undocumented immigrants, if hating is your thing, but how does that extend to the children?

Yet, the complications of policy are nothing compared with the complications of logistics. Continue reading →

We have turned the method of selecting Supreme Court Justices into a political blood bath. In doing so, we have cheapened the Court. That is, of course, if you agree with me that law and politics are similar but different things.

Here is a proposal that might lessen the problem: Continue reading →

As much as Nino Scalia was hated with a burning passion by most of the criminal defense bar, he had his moments. One such moment was in Crawford, holding that defendant’s right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him” just like the Sixth Amendment said, meant just that. It was a watershed change for criminal defendants, no longer to be left to argue with a lab report. You can’t cross a lab report. And Justice Antonin Scalia made this happen with, wait for it, originalism.

But Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says originalism is terrible, mostly because Amy Coney Barrett says she follows in Scalia’s footsteps as to originalism, making her terrible too.

The Times probably meant “our rights,” but who’s to say what the right word is anymore?

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Ed. Note: Our intrepid TV and Movie Critic, Harris County Chief Public Defender Alex Bunin, reviews the new movie by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, “Mighty Ira,” which is now available in virtual cinema through Angelika Film Center through Oct. 22. On Oct. 23, it will be available to stream on Amazon (free on Prime), iTunes, and Google Play and on Oct. 27, it will be available on DVD and Blu-ray.

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A client of mine years ago owned a bodega in the South Bronx. He wanted to lead a successful, law-abiding life as a local businessman, and used to obsess about the quality of his tomatoes. But he grew up on the streets and realized that it was hard to sell tomatoes, or anything else, if kids from the neighborhood stole them from his carefully tended bins.

He kept a handgun and a bat behind the counter. He wouldn’t hesitate to use them. He wasn’t going to be killed by a robber and he wasn’t going to let his precious tomatoes walk out the door unless they were purchased. It wasn’t a commentary about life in South Bronx, but a very firm grasp of reality. Kids would rob him blind if he let them. He was not going to let them. Continue reading →

By this point in time, reactions to Nicole Hannah-Jones’ “1619 Project” have largely been divided into two camps. One camp is filled with history scholars who have pointed out that her claims are largely false, baseless and ahistorical. The other camp doesn’t care much about facts or history because they like, or at least feel compelled to like lest they be called racists by their dear friends, the message.

That the New York Times “quietly” changed one of the most ridiculous claims, which Hannah-Jones denied making to her discredit, either proved the point or proved nothing, depending on how dedicated to the secular religion of social justice one was. But is there a middle ground, where one can appreciate the “message” without getting hung up on the boldly false assertions that will make up the curriculum in woke school districts? Nicholas Guyatt tries to find it. Continue reading →

The facts in Doe v. RPI are of the sort that typically make a federal judge cringe. No one needs to know this much about the sexual claims of college students. It’s not that they don’t know it happens, but no one wants the image in their heads. Nonetheless, Judge David Hurd in the Northern District of New York told the ugly conflicting stories.

Both Doe, the male student, and Roe, the female student, agree that she plied him with vodka to get him drunk while she remained sober, and they then had consensual sex, as they had numerous times before. What happened after that is in dispute.

However, Doe eventually gave in and had sex with Roe again. Plaintiff claims that he remembers only pieces of this round of intercourse, but he claims to distinctly remember that Roe asked him to put his hands around her neck, even though this made him uncomfortable. Plaintiff eventually complied, if only briefly. Roe agrees that she requested that plaintiff put his hand on her neck and provide pressure, but she claims that this happened during their first, consensual encounter on that night. Continue reading →

New York’s Chief Judge, Janet DiFiore, called for a study to be done to ascertain the extent of racial bias in the court system.

DiFiore said in June that her request for the report was spurred by the killing of George Floyd and came two days after a Brooklyn court officer allegedly posted a racist illustration depicting President Obama with a noose around his neck, which Johnson says “peeled the lid off of long-simmering racial tensions.”

Long-simmering, indeed. Continue reading →