The New York City Legal Aid Society has created a preliminary “cheat sheet” on the reforms included in the latest state budget, which activists are claiming to be huge and will change everything. The description is, necessarily, incomplete, as the nuts and bolts are long, prolix and replete with caveats, qualifications and exceptions.

In their last minute efforts to pass reforms, accommodate prosecutorial and police complaints with the magic bullet solutions of reformers, they created a shiny new Rube Goldberg machine for criminal law. The LAS review of the changes looks like a very fair description of the amendments, albeit one that might be a bit too aspirational as to whether things will work out the way they’re intended.

There are some real changes in there, such as the expanded, mandatory use of Desk Appearance Tickets, provided people provide identification when arrested and they aren’t arrested for a sex or domestic offense, since crimes against women are now carved out from all other crimes because oppressed women are special. Continue reading →

In a column from the “outsider” perspective, Ross Douthat echoes what Harvey Silverglate wrote in a comment here: Joe Biden is the only, the last, liberal with any potential to seek the Democratic nomination for president.

The reason Biden is such an attractive candidate on the Left is that he is one of the very few who are vying for the Democratic nomination who is a liberal rather than a “progressive.” The difference between liberals and progressives is that the former retain the left-liberal’s respect for civil liberties, while the progressives are concerned with ends but not with means (the antithesis of civil libertarians).

There’s no “very few” here; there’s only one. The distinction between liberal and progressive is glaringly obvious to liberals, and non-existent to progressives. The former is principled. The latter is purely outcome-oriented, based on simplistic identitarian zero-sum choices, the intersectional victim hierarchy and a child-like disregard for facts, logic and reality. Continue reading →

Guy Hamilton-Smith has never made a secret of his circumstances, hard as it’s been. It happened long ago. He’s paid his debt to society and tried to move on, by going to law school and seeking admission to the bar. The bar has been unforgiving, and that’s been his burden.

But there is a woman who loves him, married him and knows the person he is today, despite his past failing. For the sake of Google, this woman will be called Paper Tiger, after the handle she uses on twitter. Her name doesn’t have to be connected in perpetuity to what transpired.

So I’m going to say this: my wife got fired from her job today.

Not because of anything she did. Her clients loved her. She got great reviews.

They found out she was married to me.

That’s it.

— Guy Hamilton-Smith (@G_Padraic) April 1, 2019

Continue reading →

The headline at the Washington Post was either shocking or amusing, according to how closely one follows such issues or how flexible one’s ideology is to compromise when necessary.

Joe Biden’s affectionate, physical style with women comes under scrutiny

Another day, another person, and this would have been demanding his head on a platter. But not this time. Joe Biden’s not all rapey, but has an “affectionate, physical style.”

In some of the photos, Joe Biden is behind the women, his hands on their shoulders, as he whispers in their ears. He embraces Hillary Clinton, his hands around her torso. He kisses a young girl’s head, his fingers framing her face, as she looks blankly toward the camera.

Continue reading →

One of the most obvious reasons people should care about bad cops and prosecutors is that DNA has brought some of the mistakes home. Not just that it happened, but to actual homes, in the form of property tax. You’re willing to accept mistakes? You support cops, even when they’re wrong, violent, racist or criminals? Not that it’s a fair position, but it’s certainly not unique.

Then the bill comes due. Not always, and not enough as many cases have no DNA to prove innocence and so the errors will never be found, the innocent never freed. But in those few that are, the cost can be steep. And as the people of Gage County, Nebraska, found out, it can be a bill from decades before. And it can be costly.

The tangled case began in February 1985, when Ms. Wilson was found inside the apartment where she lived by herself. She had been beaten, raped and suffocated.

A horrible crime anywhere, but especially in a rural county in eastern Nebraska. Continue reading →

Neither Dr. SJ nor I had much in our youth. She would make pot holders and I would take any job that I could, from shoveling snow to washing windows to being a warm body at a nuclear reactor. Somehow, we both figured out that hard work, education and goal orientation would serve us better than complaining about what we didn’t have.

By the time we married, we were first clawing our way to financial independence, which seemed like a wise choice given that nobody else was going to finance dinner every night. Over the years, we worked, saved and never lived beyond our means. But Jimmy was a different story. He bought a fancy condo on a good street that cost far more than he could possibly afford. He drove a fancy car, and got a new one every three years. He wore the best suits. Where I went to Brancrofts to look respectable, he went bespoke.

The problem was the bill collectors. Jimmy was always hiding from them, and they were always looking for Jimmy. He had no money in the bank, but he looked like a million bucks. When I asked him why, he told me life was short and he was going to enjoy every moment of it, living the best he could get away with. They might take away his car or his apartment, but they couldn’t take back the good times he had. Continue reading →

Kalief Browder’s case was an exercise in failure at many levels, far too many for the passionate activists to grasp. Bail beyond his family’s ability to pay was one, but so was Speedy Trial, a dishonest prosecutorial sham and the judges who allowed it to happen, and a lawyer who let the case drag on. But passionate people need a poster boy, and he’s been picked, even though there is no suggestion that the deal in the works would have changed a thing.

Since his death, the movement to abolish cash bail has grown stronger, especially among the state’s urban politicians. On Friday, leaders in the state Legislature were poised to move forward with a plan to eliminate cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes while keeping monetary requirements or other conditions for violent felonies.

There’s a tradeoff that is buried in this description. At present, the sole basis for imposition of bail is the likelihood of a return to court. There is no prong for danger to the community, so a person accused of assault with a job and strong community ties will be released, while a turnstile jumper with a history of bench warrants may not. Continue reading →

There might be something in the water at the New York State Court of Appeals*, because it is rare to see a comfortable majority win this sorely.

At 19, Omar Alvarez’s gang shot at a group of younger teenagers, killing one and disabling the other. After a three-month trial and his conviction, Alvarez refused to apologize and laughed at his sentencing. The judge, knowing deep in the cockles of his heart that Alvarez could never be rehabilitated, sentenced him to a minimum of 66.6 years in prison before parole was even available. More on that later.

Alvarez asked New York for a free lawyer for his appeal. But the 18B Panel didn’t send him its best, and it was three years after the appointment before Alvarez got a letter: Continue reading →

AUSA Katherine Pfeifle went for it on cross.

When Pfeifle brought up his $4 million Dallas house, Rimlawi did not dodge the subject.

“If you want me to say I’ve moved up in the world, yes,” he said. “Yes, I have a nice house.”

A surgeon owns a nice house? Not exactly shocking. But what might be shocking is that the government, despite the cries that they never prosecute white collar crime, are trying to use their clout, the fear they wreak on their targets, to bring down what they claim is a nefarious scheme of bribery and kickbacks between Forest Park Hospital and the surgeons whose patients they sought to fill its operating rooms. Continue reading →

The Second Circuit smacked it down in Copeland v. Vance, when the attack was the lack of a mens rea requirement for New York’s misbegotten gravity knife law. It didn’t matter that you weren’t a criminal, that your possession had no criminal purpose, that it was, anywhere else, a perfectly lawful knife as any ordinary person would use. No, that wasn’t good enough.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit acknowledged the law’s absence of a mens rea requirement but held that it makes no difference whether the defendant believed a knife was legal or not, whether he actually attempted a “wrist flick” to open the knife, or even if he received advice from a police officer that the knife was lawful. Ultimately, the court below suggested that challenges to such prosecutions could only be raised on an as-applied basis—meaning that when someone is prosecuted under this law for carrying a Swiss Army or other common folding knife, then he may be able to raise this defense.

The only solution was to buy a knife on Amazon, or at your local hardware store, and find out later whether some cop could, after as many tries as he felt inclined to give it, “flick” into movement, get arrested, spend a night in jail and await the joy of fighting it out. Continue reading →