Back in the Fault Lines days, my mean-ass editor tasked me with a weekly assignment called The Friday Fail. It was my job to comb the internet for the most spectacular failures of the criminal justice system and send the top five to the readership to vote on which was the greatest failure of them all.

Yours truly is a touch tired this week from work and life developments, so I’m dipping into the Friday Fail archives to bring the SJ readership a new guessing game. All of these but are former Friday Fail contestants. I’m not making any of this up. Continue reading →

First, the New York Times had the audacity to publish an insipid op-ed by a United States Senator on a matter of huge public importance at the moment. The editorial page editor defended the decision to publish diverse views. But a spokesperson, who has obviously never read an op-ed by Roxane Gay, subsequently announced that it was a big mistake.

The Times issued a statement saying the essay fell short of the newspaper’s standards.

What that means isn’t clear. They claimed it was “rushed,” which is pretty much how op-eds work, but there were no typos. A wag might question what “standards” they’re referring to, but it’s not as if this statement were issued by the newspaper of record where they used words that minimally explained what they hell they mean, so they can be forgiven their trespasses. Well, this one, anyway. Continue reading →

Decisions made in the heat of passion aren’t always the best decisions. Some might even say they are usually the worst decisions, as there is a bone in our head that precludes thought when passions run high. While passion has generally become a social driver over the past few years, it’s overwhelmed many in the past ten days. And when I predicted that “Defund Police” will gain no traction, I may have been wrong because the idea is idiotic. I failed to take into account passion.

The Los Angeles city council has introduced a bill to reduce police funding by $150 million. Continue reading →

The junior Senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, has an op-ed in the New York Times defending the use of force to quell protests, riots and looting. If only we could listen in on James Bennett’s discussing the decision to publish it.

JB: You’re not going to believe this, but Tom Cotton actually sent us an op-ed to defend Trump!
Random Editorial Board Person: Holy shit! Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!!!
JB: This will make their heads explode! We’ll get a gazillion hits. Ad revs will go through the roof!
Random Editorial Board Person: Holy shit! Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!!!
JB: Of course, our readers will be outraged and blame us for giving this asshole a platform, but who cares? Love or hate, they’ll read, and we can pretend we’re being fair to all points of view! That will shut Trump up with his whining.
Random Editorial Board Person: Holy shit! Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!!!

Continue reading →

Black lives matter. It’s a subset of all lives matter, but it’s worthy of being separated from the greater statement because of two things.

1. Police shoot and kill black men in significant disproportion to their percentage of the population.
2. Police shoot and kill innocent/unarmed black men in significant disproportion to their percentage of the population.

These are separate things, and separate problems. But as too often happens, most people fail to appreciate the nature of the problems and conflate them with a simplistic myth that’s not at all accurate. This has been made clear in the belief that prisons are full of only black and Hispanic men, while white guys walk free. Again, the problem is disproportion, not that white men aren’t arrested, convicted and imprisoned. They are, just not nearly as disproportionately as black men. Continue reading →

Following the complaint charging former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin with a dubious count of murder in the third degree, the state attorney general, Keith Ellison assumed control of the prosecution and a new complaint issued increasing the top count to Murder 2.

Why this was done is curious on two levels. The only difference in the net result upon conviction would be an increase the maximum sentence from 25 years to 40 years, which would seem to conflict with the cries to reform sentences and reduce mass incarceration. But more to the point, the primary distinction seems to be symbolic, that second degree murder feels more serious than third, and that would come closer to sating the demand for blood. Continue reading →

It’s not as if lawyers lack opportunity to use their skills, their license, to do whatever it is they believe to serve the public good. Heck, if any profession is well positioned to stand up for whatever their flavor of justice, it’s law. Which is why this accusation is so confounding.

Two lawyers were charged with taking part in a Molotov cocktail attack on a police patrol car over the weekend — a human rights lawyer and a Princeton-educated associate at a Manhattan law firm.

The attack during the Brooklyn protests left the dashboard of a blue-and-white police car charred after a night of violent clashes between protesters and police, a symbol of the chaos wrought over a weekend of sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent demonstrations. Continue reading →

An internet lifetime ago, I wrote that the dreaded Qualified Immunity was “a problem, but not the problem.” It’s since caught fire on social media as the cure for what ails police brutality, with every blue check pundit putting it at the top of the list of fixes that will end police violence, save the next George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, and make us run faster and jump higher.

So what? QI is bad law, should be eliminated and what’s the harm of using this moment in time to eliminate it, whether by legislation as offered by Rep. Justin Amash or by the Supreme Court as it may revisit the doctrine. Of course, few who have jumped on the Anti-QI bandwagon grasp that the Supreme Court doesn’t serve as representative body, to be petitioned for change or influenced by ratio on twitter. Continue reading →

It’s about as black as black letter law can be: The defense of property is not worth the taking of a human life. Except, of course, the Castle Doctrine, particularly the Texas version which makes the Procaccino flavor taste like it needs salt. To the extent morality comes into play in the law, however, the defense of your television doesn’t justify your taking a life.

Or does it?

Peaceful protests are happening, but so is looting. which as the AP Style Book now states, isn’t looting but rather “protesters breaking into stores and stealing what’s on the shelf.” Don’t blame me. I didn’t say so. Some argue that looting is not merely understandable, but justified by some bastardization of Martin Luther King’s “voice of the unheard” quote or historical injustices that will be historical injustices forever. Is that so? If not, what can be done about it? What should be done about it? Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is 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.

On Monday, June 1, 2020, Louisville Metro Police Chief Steve Conrad was fired by the mayor, Greg Fischer. While this sort of thing happens all the time, since most chiefs serve at the will of the mayor or the city manager, depending on the structure of city government, this was an unusual case.

First, the chief was fired because the last two officer-involved shootings, both of which resulted in the death of honest, hard-working, black citizens who were not violating the law, were not caught on body cam video.[1] Second, and no less important, was that Conrad was set to retire at the end of the month. Continue reading →