The story of how Houston Texans wide receiver Keith Mumphery was ousted from his job upon an old story being dredged up, and the story itself being a classic example of the failure of due process on multiple levels, was bad. Very bad.

Mumphery graduated in 2014 and was going for his masters as he played for the Houston Texans. Until the Detroit Free Press learned of the matter and asked the Texans how it missed this when drafting Mumphery. He was then unceremoniously cut from the team. It’s #MeToo time.

Mumphery did the best thing he could do, retain Andrew Miltenberg to sue the notorious Michigan State, long-time home of sexual abuser Larry Nasser whose decades of abuse were ignored. The college had to get out from under its reputation of protecting Nasser, and Mumphery was an excellent person to sacrifice. Miltenberg was not going to let that happen. Continue reading →

A legion of lawyers, judges and law professors hate the Sentencing Guidelines. I am not one of them. From the beginning, I thought that the Guidelines made sense because they held out the hope that unwarranted sentencing disparity could be addressed, if not eliminated.

When the poorly reasoned sentencing decisions by the Supreme Court came out that ultimately turned the Sentencing Guidelines into Swiss cheese (based, as they were, on a misreading of history at the time of the Founding[i]), we show ponies (federal judges) were off to the races. Always insanely jealous of our prerogatives, a large number of us began to sentence people as we liked despite what our colleagues down the hall did in similar circumstances.

We now know for certain that what sentence you receive in the same federal court in the same large city often depends upon what judge you draw, and the difference is frequently significant. U.S. Sentencing Commission, Intra-City Differences in Federal Sentencing Practices, Federal District Judges in 30 Cities, 2005 – 2017, p. 7 (2019) (stating simply: “In most cities, the length of a defendant’s sentence increasingly depends on which judge in the courthouse is assigned to his or her case.”)[ii] (“Intra-City Differences”).[iii] Continue reading →

A baseball bat is a wonderful and extremely useful sporting good item. It’s also a vicious weapon, if swung at one’s head. It’s not the fault of the bat that it can be both, but the nature of its use. Knives work in a similar way, great for cutting one’s food, opening boxes, cutting rope and threatening to gut someone if they fail to hand over their money.

But then, New York’s gravity knife law wasn’t directed at the possession of all knives, because everyone understood that knives, per se, weren’t objects of evil. Instead, it was a reaction to a quirk in time, a moment’s hysteria. GIs returning from WWII brought back Luftwaffe Fallschirmjäger-Messers, German paratrooper knives, which were without question gravity knives. They scared people, because the knives came out of nowhere and who, but for someone evil, would carry such evil knives? Continue reading →

On top of the world, the view is spectacular.

Looked around, but didn’t find David here. I’ll keep looking.

Out of here for a bit. I won’t have much internet access, so I’ve sent David the keys to the joint while I’m away. Please don’t let him crash the Healey.

Have fun and be well.

What if you took a bunch of ideas that all your most passionate pals agreed were either cool, edgy, just or moral, and mixed them together in a big pot? You would end up with San Francisco.

The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.

The problem with reducing problems to the “basic problem” is why Farhad Manjoo, and those who view their world with the facile simplicity that created this American Experiment in progress can stare their failure in the face and still fail to understand how everything went awry. Continue reading →

Doug Glanville got video bombed while doing a Cubs game. He didn’t know it at the time, but found it soon enough.

Ambiguity has always been a friend to racism.

On May 7, during a television broadcast of a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field, I was on camera doing in-game commentary for NBC Sports Chicago when, unbeknown to me, a fan behind me wearing a Cubs sweatshirt made an upside-down “O.K.” sign with his hand.

He’s right that ambiguity has always been a friend to racism, but the problem is that ambiguity is a friend to everything, because it’s ambiguous, and thus susceptible to many interpretations, all of which are similarly valid and invalid because that’s the nature of ambiguity. Continue reading →

With the attention given the Ron Sullivan debacle at being punished by the unduly passionate children of Harvard, former OJ prosecutor Chris Darden’s dilemma has largely gone unnoticed. It’s surprising, since it carries all the usual sexy indicators: a murdered celebrity, a well-known lawyer and death threats. Yet, it has remained largely in the shadows. And it shouldn’t.

The threatening phone calls to Chris Darden’s law office began almost immediately. The messages on Instagram and Facebook trickled in soon after, some from anonymous accounts.

One caller left a voicemail, Darden recalled, saying he hoped someone would walk up behind the attorney and shoot him in the head.

“And I’m a shooter,” the voice said.

Continue reading →

Bernie pulled a Bernie.

If we are a nation that can pay baseball players hundreds of millions of dollars, don’t tell me we can’t afford to pay teachers the salaries they deserve.

Is this a false equivalency, or maybe just a non-sequitur? Or should we put aside the multitude of reasons why a comparison between star ballplayers and teachers fails on every level and focus instead on the latter part of Bernie’s being Bernie. What do teachers “deserve”? What does “deserve” have to do with what they get paid? Continue reading →

While there have been a number of somewhat disappointing “progressive prosecutors,” who remain prosecutors even though they mouth the sounds of criminal law reform, there have also been a few who are proving to be the “real deal.” Larry Krasner in Philly. In Dallas, John Creuzot is making waves with his free shoplifting position, and in Boston, Rachel Rollins seems to be doing what she said she would do.

Will they pull it off, put their reforms into practice and make it work, without bringing down a wave of crime or unintended consequences on the good people of their cities who elected them to office with the best of intentions? Time will tell, but so far it appears that more than a few basic assumptions upon which prosecutors and lawmakers, and their fans, have relied forever are being tested and failing. Maybe imprisoning people. more people and for ever-greater lengths of time, isn’t the only answer to protecting the public.

Having made some headway into the prosecutorial function, even if it’s only a few at the moment who are serious about reforming their practices, attention is turning toward the third leg of the criminal law stool. Judges. As much as Larry Krasner’s office is trying to correct errors of the past, the judges aren’t cooperating. Indeed, judges are fighting prosecutors the way prosecutors fought the defense. Continue reading →