Adherence to the Constitution requires adequate funding. It isn’t satisfied by pretending to care. Either you will honor the Constitution by funding indigent defense, or you will fail the people of this State, but you will no longer trick them by putting on a show.

—My statement to the Tennessee Indigent Defense Task Force on May 20, 2016.

If you ask just about any current member of the General Assembly, they will tell you that the annual appropriation to fund indigent defense representation programs is among the least popular appropriation they make every year. In fact, many legislators lean toward cutting this appropriation…I mention this only to help you understand that there is no chance…that the General Assembly will agree to appropriate more money to fund the current system. Thus, any proposal to increase the current appropriation…to represent indigent criminal defendants is and will continue to be dead on arrival.

—Task Force Chairman William Koch, Letter, February 10, 2016. (Emphasis mine)

Tennessee continues its waltz around indigent defense funding with more ham-fisted “recommendations” that do nothing to solve a key problem. Lawyers with experience are turning from indigent representation in droves, and no “recommendations” from the Volunteer State’s Supremes can fix that. Continue reading →

First there was the outrage.

The story Dixon-Cole spun afterward was alarming: She claimed the trooper repeatedly told her he would let her go in exchange for sexual favors. When she said no, she claimed the trooper sexually assaulted her, according to a statement Monday from her attorney.

The 37-year-old North Texas woman’s story was widely shared on social media, aided and amplified by social activist Shaun King, who recently brought attention to the New York lawyer who made xenophobic comments about Spanish-speaking employees at a New York deli.

“This system was not designed to protect us — it was designed to punish us,” King wrote in a blog post, “and for it to do anything other than that — we must force it work on our behalf.”

Continue reading →

Almost immediately after OJ’s aquittal, defendants came to the office demanding a “dream team.” OJ had a dream team, and they wanted a dream team too.

Me: Cool. How much money do you have?
Client: Money?
Me: Dream Teams cost money. How much money do you have?

They could not, of course, afford a dream team. Some couldn’t afford a lawyer at all. Some would complain that it wasn’t fair, and perhaps it wasn’t, but that wasn’t going to change anything. They were entitled to counsel because the Sixth Amendment says so. They were not entitled to my counsel. Nor were they entitled to a dream team. Continue reading →

When the issue came before the Supreme Court in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, the Court held that schools could be liable for peer to peer harassment under Title IX, but only if it was “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it can be said to deprive the victims of access to the educational opportunities or benefits provided by the school.”

If this sounds vaguely, but not exactly, familiar, it’s because disingenuous advocates have misstated it. They changed the conjunctive to the disjunctive and then promoted the notion that any one of these criteria, watered down again by rhetorical gamesmanship, would suffice. As it involves harassment, it primarily implicated speech, as conduct was characterized by its criminal nature, assault or rape.

And what organization was out there to defend speech, to defend against the false characterization of law to reduce the burden to punish speech? It’s not the ACLU. Continue reading →

Orin Kerr famously wrote “brilliant people agree with me.”

One of the consequences of confirmation bias is that we are overly impressed by ideas that we happen to share. It’s a natural instinct, if not watched carefully. If you read something that reflects or resonates with your own views, you’ll agree with it. Upon agreeing with it, you’ll think it is highly persuasive. And if it’s highly persuasive, it’s probably brilliant.

That was in 2010, back when times were simpler and our world bucolic. Today the adjectives have expanded to “moral,” “decent” and “just.” All moral, decent and just people will certainly agree, because to disagree makes you immoral, indecent and unjust. This is a subtle but significant paradigm shift, where any disagreement no longer relates solely to your intelligence, but the goodness of your soul. Before you were stupid. Now you’re stupid and venal. Continue reading →

Whenever a new stat comes out, people with agendas try to figure out how to use it to their advantage. It usually reveals more about the person doing the interpreting than the stat to be interpreted. And so it is with America’s birthrate.

Last week, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that America’s birthrate reached a historic low in 2017, falling to 60.2 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. For a population in the developed world to replace itself, the average woman needs to have around 2.1 children. In the United States, where fertility has been below replacement for about a decade, the average woman now has 1.77.

The stat shows that we’re not having enough children to maintain our population. In the late 1960s, there was a push for this outcome, called Zero Population Growth, premised on the belief that our birthrate was unsustainable and would result in starvation and devastation of resources. There was a time when people had oodles of kids, given high mortality rates and the need to milk the cows and plow the back 40. These are both now social anachronisms.  Continue reading →

California’s perpetual governor, Jerry Brown, draws the dreaded Chipotle analogy.

Gov. Jerry Brown, who in his last two terms has pushed, often unsuccessfully, to reshape the state’s expansive higher education system, on Wednesday suggested that California universities should be more like Chipotle.

Tastes great and filling? No, no. Continue reading →

Former Chicago cop William Whitley may be despicable scum, but that’s not why he copped a plea to having sex with a minor in the Northern District of Illinois rather than a state court.

Whitley pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court to one count of sex trafficking of a minor.

Was it not bad enough that Whitley, with his uniform on a hanger and his gun under the pillow, paid for sex with a 14-year-old prostitute that it’s characterized as “sex trafficking”? This tidbit is tossed in somewhat gratuitously as a reminder that the phrase evokes an image of pimps and their sex slaves, not a john buying sex.

But even this characterization fails to explain how Whitley ended up in federal court, charged under 18 U.S.C. § 1591(a). How did they make “a federal case” of a routine offense? One word: rubber. Continue reading →

Michigan State has good reason to be particularly sensitive to threats of suit, allegations of Title iX violations, failing to believe the “victim.” Given its failure to protect a great many women from Larry Nasser, the last thing it needed was another incident. Which gave rise to a situation ripe for abuse.

According to the suit filed by Andrew Miltenberg on behalf of former Houston Texans wide receiver, and former MSU student, Keith Mumphery, the psuedonymous Jane Roe was the aggressor, infuriated by Mumphery’s refusal to have sex without a condom.

At this juncture, Plaintiff called a friend to discuss what had just happened and whether he had acted incorrectly in bringing up wearing a condom. Roe participated in this conversation, and at one point took Plaintiff’s cellphone from him and spoke with Plaintiff’s friend. Continue reading →

There is an eerily reminiscent aspect to the scheme perpetrated by the guys who ran Mugshots.com. Shades of David Blade, the revenge porn “takedown” lawyer. The scam was simple, but effective. Put something on the internet that someone didn’t want to be seen, and then charge them to remove it.

Who wants their mugshot online? Some argue that it enables them to know who the bad dudes are, who might move in next door to rape their children. Others might argue that selling mugshots is a new revenue stream for local government. Some just get off on seeing people suffer. Continue reading →