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.

There is further information relevant to the situation in Kenosha on more than one front. This deals with both the situation with Jacob Blake and the situation with Kyle Rittenhouse. I imagine that both sides are not going to like what I have to say, not that this will stop me from saying it. Continue reading →

It’s been obvious for a long time, though denied with a vehemence that only the unduly passionate could love: Identity trumps facts, law and reality. Orin Kerr summed it up.

These days, if it's announced that X assaulted Y, a lot of people can't decide whether that's good or bad until they know the politics of X, Y, and the reporter who wrote the announcement.

That's not good.

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) August 28, 2020

Simultaneously the excuses and condemnations fly, ranging from the inane to the outright lies, all to achieve the only possible outcome: as to the shooting of Jacob Blake, that this was a clear example of racist police attempting to murder a black man, and as to Kyle Rittenhouse, that he was a white-supremacist vigilante out to murder protesters. Continue reading →

At Reason, Zuri Davis runs through the failures, bit by bit, of how Tennessee cops searching for a 16-year-old suspected of breaking into cars managed to not merely end up pointing guns at a naked woman in her own home after breaking down her door because she didn’t open it within 30 seconds, but it ended up being the wrong house.

Several minutes later, the officers told Hines they had the wrong home.

How is that possible? Continue reading →

The rape and murder happened in 1983. At the time, people thought we were a fairly advanced society. Horses had long since given way to cars. We had science. The law had gone through the Warren Court and come out better on the other side, protecting the rights of defendants in what today might be considered some social justice fashion. So a conviction for a rape and murder in 1985 had to be pretty reliable, because we were a caring, smart, advanced nation trying to do the right thing.

Yet, the conviction of then-18, now-55, year-old Robert DuBoise, by a unanimous jury beyond a reasonable doubt, got everything wrong. Every single thing wrong. 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.

In 1862, in Minnesota on the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation, the Santee Dakota Indians were starving to death. They had agreed to cede land to the United States and move onto the reservation, and the government agreed to provide for their needs, including food.[1]

In 2020, blacks had suffered for years with young blacks being killed by police officers, culminating in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, without officers being held accountable for misconduct.[2] In both cases, the affected population did what people do when they have taken all that they can take and have no other readily available options—they reacted with violence.[3] Continue reading →

It was bound to happen, and it happened. What exactly happened is unclear, although one side claims some men with guns were defending a gas station while the other side claims they were just random vigilantes looking for a fight. Either way, it happened.

Three people were shot early Wednesday, two fatally, law enforcement officials said, during a chaotic night of demonstrations over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black resident whose children were nearby as their father was shot this week by a white police officer.

Continue reading →

They come fresh-faced from elite law schools, leather briefcases unscuffed and starched white shirts, ready to “do justice” by putting the bad guys where they belong. Some leave after their commitment. Some remain for the duration of their career. They’re prosecutors and they believe that what they do is both right and necessary.

But the closest they ever get to the life of a defendant is a social distance away in a courtroom. For years, I’ve urged that every new prosecutor spend a week in prison, eat Nutraloaf and stare at walls when they aren’t dodging an angry guy with a tattoo across his forehead that says “kill.” Continue reading →

As of July 29, 2020, police have shot to death 111 black people and 215 white people. Each death has its own story, some of which are about police abuse. Jacob Blake didn’t die, and so he isn’t one of these numbers, and his shooting isn’t a simple case of a cop execution.

Police were called because of a “domestic dispute,” which turned out to be a “verbal altercation” between two women. Blake apparently tried to break it up. Police arrived and details are sparse after that. It would seem that Blake was the good guy here, but whether the cops knew that, or even knew who Blake was, is unclear. It’s like they did what they normally do, tried to put the situation on hold until they could figure it out. Continue reading →

Protests present particular problems to police. They see masses of people, not individuals, for the most part, and when they do a round up, it’s not for individualized conduct but for being part of the crowd. It might be a mob. It might be a protest. Maybe the person arrested “deserves” it, whatever that means, or the person arrested might just be a warm body within arm’s reach of a cop.

Portland’s new progressive prosecutor, Mike Schmidt, has chosen to deal with arrests “categorically.”

Ten days after taking office, Mr. Schmidt effectively dismissed charges against more than half of about 600 people arrested since the protests began at the end of May.

Continue reading →

There’s a lot of conflicting information about the impact of marijuana, and it’s not accidental. It’s the result of the federal prohibition on the study of the demon weed. Whether it belongs on Schedule I is a huge issue, but the fact that we’re bereft of sound, scientific scholarship is a problem that smacked states legalizing weed in the face. How much better off would we have been had pot been studied? But alas, it couldn’t be and it wasn’t.

So let’s do it again, but this time with people.

In the wake of the protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, some faculty published an open letter of demands to overcome “anti-Blackness racism” at Princeton. Like many such letters, it included good and bad proposals. Most distinctive and disturbing, however, was the demand for the creation of a faculty committee empowered to “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of the faculty.”

Continue reading →