The mural on the wall of the student union at the University of Manchester included the poem “If” by beloved British author Rudyard Kipling. The irony is overwhelming.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

So naturally, it had to go. Continue reading →

Hartford has had a long history of being a pretty nasty city when it comes to cops beating on people. Whether that makes it worse, or different, than a lot of other places can be debated, but what matters is that it’s less than user-friendly for many. Bloomfield High School football coach Tylon Outlaw felt something, but it was not the love.

The coach had gone to a Hartford restaurant to meet with friends regarding a proposed business venture. Upon leaving, he spoke with several other friends he recognized in a taxi cab.

An undercover Hartford detective driving an unmarked car yelled at the coach, “Hey motherfucker.”

Perceiving this to be an informal urban pleasantry, he responded in kind.

That was in 2004, when he was a college football player and “urban pleasantries” were more freely exchanged. It turned out to be less pleasant than expected. Continue reading →

Judge Richard Kopf doesn’t care much about the “vanishing jury trial,” mostly because he’s got so little faith in humanity.

Indeed, I sometimes joke that jury trials are unconstitutional because no sane person would randomly select from the great unwashed 12 stiffs to make a decision that can significantly impact both the public and the defendant. Besides, criminal jury trials are almost always a waste of time. With few exceptions, federal criminal jury trials are the equivalent of one long guilty plea where the defendant has rightly calculated that he or she has nothing to lose and is hoping to win the lottery.

Of course, Judge Kopf isn’t entirely serious when he says that, recognizing that the occasional innocent defendant gets indicted and, without a trial, he would never have the option of being maxed out on the back end to remind him of the folly of rolling the dice. Continue reading →

As I told SHG sometime back, there is nothing sadder than an old judge trying desperately to remain relevant.

I come out of retirement, briefly, not endeavoring to remain relevant, but rather to complain about the use and characterization of one my past posts by the NACDL in its breathless report entitled, The Trial Penalty: The Sixth Amendment Right To Trial on the Verge of Extinction and How To Save It (Summer 2018).[i] I have no earthly understanding of why the NACDL ended with a footnote to one of my posts from Hercules and the umpire.

As I have written before on Simple Justice, I am not much concerned with the “vanishing federal criminal jury.” See Richard G. Kopf, Kopf: A Contrarian’s View of the Vanishing Federal Criminal Jury Trial (December 27, 2017). Indeed, I sometimes joke that jury trials are unconstitutional because no sane person would randomly select from the great unwashed 12 stiffs to make a decision that can significantly impact both the public and the defendant. Besides, criminal jury trials are almost always a waste of time. With few exceptions, federal criminal jury trials are the equivalent of one long guilty plea where the defendant has rightly calculated that he or she has nothing to lose and is hoping to win the lottery.  Continue reading →

Two spoiler alerts: (i) this post will be about me playing advocatus diaboli on behalf of a purported real-life devil from Eithiopia whose trial and sentence was held before Senior U.S. District Judge John L. Kane, Jr. with whom I and others had the honor and privilege of writing at our beloved Fault Lines; and (ii) there could be a fortuitous ending for Worku once he’s turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation after he completes his sentence, in that he has a chance of remaining in the U.S. despite being convicted in federal court.

The Denver Post reported on Worku’s last ditch effort before the 10^th Circuit of Appeals:

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver has dismissed an appeal by a 62-year-old man who claims his false identification as an Ethiopian prison guard who killed and tortured dozens of people led to an unfair sentencing on an unrelated U.S. immigration fraud count. Continue reading →

The story is tragic. The death of anyone is awful, but the death of an infant strikes us harder than any other. They’re helpless and pure, and when an infant dies, there’s a visceral need to blame. Infants aren’t supposed to die. And certainly not at their mother’s breast.

It was 3 a.m. and Samantha Whitney Jones’s 11-week-old son was crying.

So, Jones did what many mothers would do: She sat down and tried to breastfeed him.

About five hours later, her baby would be dead. The cause of death, prosecutors say, was a “lethal combination of drugs” ingested through Jones’s breast milk.

Continue reading →

It takes a certain kind of person to choose to read through a tax form. It takes a certain kind of person to read through a 127 page tax form. Bruce McLeod is that kind of person, when the tax form is from the American Bar Association. But what he found on page 118 of Form 990 was, well, interesting.

In 2017, the ABA became aware of an unauthorized diversion of assets totaling approximately $1.3 million over a period of multiple years, committed by a non-management staff member. The employee was immediately placed on administrative leave when the unauthorized diversion of assets was detected and was terminated the following day. The ABA commenced an investigation and notified both the Executive Committee of its board of directors and law enforcement, with whom the ABA has cooperated fully in the ongoing investigation. Furthermore, forensic experts from the accounting firm of Grant Thornton were engaged to participate in the investigation along with the ABA Internal Audit, Financial Services staff and the General Counsels Office. The ABA reviewed and revised procedures including more stringent controls and monitoring and increased financial oversight. The ABA is in the process of seeking recovery of the funds from its insurance carrier.

Continue reading →

Whether to write this post was a struggle.* On the one hand, to do so only draws more attention to a bad thing. On the other hand, the writer is someone of so little significance that no one of any worth gives a damn about what he has to say, although in this instance he managed to get a post published at a soapbox somewhat over his head, giving him a broader reach than he could possibly manage on his own.

But there are more hands involved. The people this writer threw under the bus for his own self-aggrandizement are no better served by me adding fuel to this dumpster fire, even if my purposes are better intended. And on the fourth, and final, hand, these people are far more kind and considerate than the little shit who burned them, offering explanations for this bizarre affront. That is, until the writer’s reaction to a request to take the offending post down was met with their friend’s response of “fuck you.” Continue reading →

Lacking the mad skillz of Yale law students to know with absolute certainty that the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court means “people will die,” it seemed prudent to consider what Judge Kavanaugh had actually said or written in the past rather than to assume he would reverse Roe v. Wade on the first Monday in October.

This will come as a shock to some people, but the Court deals with issues other than abortion. One such issue is criminal law, and for those of us who practice criminal defense, it’s kind of important too.

I, for one, am not surprised that Trump didn’t nominate the progeny of Thurgood Marshall, or William O. Douglas, or even Earl Warren (although he may have, but time will tell) to the Court. Why would he? Then again, neither did President Obama, whose final nominee, Merrick Garland, was more likely to sit at Sam Alito’s lunch table than Sonia Sotomayor’s. Continue reading →

There are two basic ways to explain why you did something after the fact. The first is to lie about it, favored by three-year-olds and the Trump administration. The second is to provide a rational explanation for your decision. The first relies on believing the lie. The second relies on the reasoning holding up to scrutiny. Sometimes there are bits of both in the explanation. That’s the case for the take-down of Daniella Greenbaum’s column in Business Insider.

The baseline is that Greenbaum was a columnist on staff at BI and wrote a column about how Scarlet Johansson was hounded out of a role.

Johansson is set to play a transgender man in an upcoming film, “Rub and Tug,” a film based on the true story of transgender massage parlor owner Dante “Tex” Gill. The announcement quickly garnered a reaction. Continue reading →