How hard could it be to protect the children? For crying out loud, they’re children! Children?!? So the brain trust in California enacted SB 395, because laws fix everything.

On October 11, 2017, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 395, a bill requiring that youth 15-years-old or younger cannot be questioned in what is known as a custodial interrogation, without first consulting a lawyer—either in person, by telephone, or by video conference. The bill prohibits a kid from waving Miranda rights without such a consultation. Furthermore, the young person may not waive that consultation with the lawyer either.

The law makes an exception when a police officer “who questioned the youth reasonably believed the information he or she sought was necessary to protect life or property from an imminent threat.”

The notion is straightforward, that a minor 15 or younger is incapable of waiving his right to remain silent without advice of counsel. And, indeed, it shouldn’t be particularly controversial to recognize that kids are no match for cops when it comes to the ability to get them to talk. Between the Reid Technique, submission to the shield and plain old fear, what youngster is going to tell a cop that he’s not talking? Continue reading →

New York County District Attorney Cy Vance may not have wanted to prosecute Harvey Weinstein in the first place, but now that it’s happening, he doesn’t want to lose. That would just add insult to injury, and Cy has already gotten more than a few well-deserved kicks in the nuts over his handling of the matter.

A grand jury voted on Wednesday to indict Harvey Weinstein on charges that he forced one woman to perform oral sex in his office and that he raped a second woman at a hotel, the Manhattan district attorney said.

With indictment in hand, the next step is trying the case and getting a conviction for these two alleged offenses. One question is whether the prosecution will seek to try the two accusations together, even though they are separate crimes. That will allow them to bootstrap the prejudice of one to bolster the commission of the other. But then, what of the other accusations against Weinstein?  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.

I was initially going to wait and write a more in-depth post on the going-ons at Leon Valley, Texas,[1] but circumstances compel me to write now. The problem in Leon Valley is a heavy-handed police chief who views any dissent as something to be stopped, without regard to the niceties of complying with state or federal law.

Earlier this year, a so-called First Amendment auditor started wandering through the Leon Valley police station, video-recording what he could see. At some point, he ended up in a restricted area of the department, was confronted by the chief, Joseph P. Salvaggio,[2] and asked to leave. Instead of leaving, the auditor, Jesus Padilla, went off on the chief and ended up being arrested. I don’t see a problem with the arrest in itself,[3] but the auditor community did. Continue reading →

Words are like heroin for the woke, so the New York Times editorial supporting New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s re-engineering of the city’s eight “specialized” high schools comes as little surprise. But the words used to rationalize their position are astounding.

Across the country, local efforts are at last underway to integrate schools that remain profoundly segregated more than half a century after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Nowhere is that work more important than New York City, where the school system is not only the nation’s largest but also its most segregated.

Was Orval Faubus blocking the door to Bronx Science? Hardly. The use of the word “segregated” is a lie, an evocative word employed to manipulate the unduly passionate by the big woke brains at the Times. No student is being denied admission because of her race or ethnicity.  Continue reading →

When Judge Bennett’s post arrived and I read it, I was surprised. I wouldn’t use the word, purely as a matter of personal choice because I find it to be the single most repugnant word there is, but the judge used the word and who was I to impose my values on him? Judge Bennett was the furthest thing possible from racist, and certainly was entitled to make his own choice, particularly given the context of his use of the word.

It made me uncomfortable, but it wasn’t about me. The post was published “as is.”

As a criminal defense lawyer, the word pops up with regularity. Clients use it all the time. Not white supremacist clients, but black and Hispanic clients. They use it in conversation with me. They use it with each other. I do not use it in return. Continue reading →

Is it hypocritical for Trump administration staffers to eat at a Mexican restaurant?

[Stephen Miller] decided on Espita Mezcaleria in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington D.C., whose menu features dishes from southern Mexico, including a vegetarian mole verde for $22 and fish tacos “to share” for $35. A fellow diner called him a “real-life fascist.”

Two days later, U. S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, who helps oversee the implementation of “zero tolerance,” had a similar south of the border craving.

A group of Democratic Soclialists, including a paralegal with DoJ, protested against Nielsen inside the restaurant, forcing her to leave. Continue reading →

Wendy Kaminer’s WSJ op-ed caused a bit of a ruckus among her former ACLU friends. It wasn’t exactly new information, that the ACLU’s stance on Free Speech was now in turmoil, the association trying to thread the needle between its defense of the First Amendment and its politics. In ways subtle and flagrant, it’s been clear for years now that the ACLU struggles with its civil liberties mission and its social justice ideology.

After Kaminer’s disclosure of an internal memo, the ACLU legal director, David Cole, responded:

We developed the case selection guidelines mentioned by Kaminer to address the conflicts between the many cases we consider, such as between privacy and women’s rights, gay rights and religious freedom, and speech and equality.  To be clear, the guidelines do not dictate how and when we take cases, nor do they change our policy of representing those whose views we detest.  They expressly reaffirm that free speech rights “extend to all, even to the most repugnant speakers—including white supremacists—and pursuant to ACLU policy, we will continue our longstanding practice of representing such groups in appropriate circumstances to prevent unlawful government censorship of speech.

Continue reading →

The conflicted and confused battle over separating children from parents was one prong of the scheme, and the one most obvious to attract outrage and heartbreak. Who wouldn’t feel the pain of a little girl crying as she watched her mother’s arrest? Who wouldn’t cringe at the sound of a child calling “papi, papi” from behind chain link?

But the other prong, less evocative, was the “zero tolerance” policy by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, which both involves law and requires a certain amount of background to appreciate.

In the past, people caught illegally crossing the Rio Grande were deported. Now, they are being charged with a misdemeanor under 8 U.S.C.A. § 1325. It is not a crime to be physically present in the United States without authorization, but it is a crime to engage in the conduct of eluding examination by immigration. Once a person has been deported, a second (or more) illegal re-entry is a felony. Go to prison, then get deported. Continue reading →

The Supreme Court dropped its opinion in the hotly-anticipated Carpenter case, holding in a 5-4 decision (or 5-3-1, if one sees Justice Gorsuch’s dissent as a quasi-concurring opinion) that a warrant is required for law enforcement to obtain historical cellphone data.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
If this were only cleared away,’
They said, it would be grand!’

If you’re looking for scholarly discussion of the opinion, you would do better to read Orin Kerr’s thoughts, or perhaps Lior Strahilevitz and Matthew Tokson. Unlike the academics, and the justices, there was one thing I hoped would come out of this decision. It didn’t. Continue reading →

In a meandering homage to Mother Nature, a challenge between competing press releases and promises with caveats and reality, the New York Times editorial applauds a new policy while noting that it doesn’t quite fix the problem:

A new policy Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Tuesday will lead to fewer people being arrested for smoking marijuana in public. But the new approach — in which officers would usually issue summonses instead of hauling people off to jail — does not address the core problem of racial inequality and poses new dangers.

The issuance of summonses rather than arrests is a step forward, though it doesn’t change who gets the summons, which will remain the black and brown guys uptown because that’s where the cops make their numbers. There’s no big mystery to it, even though it eludes so many New Yorkers. Cops don’t bust weed smokers in Sutton Place penthouses. Cops toss kids smoking reefer on the corner of 163rd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.  Continue reading →