There was a time when the internet offered a breathtaking opportunity to watch, listen and learn from lectures on a broad array of academic subjects with just a click. But then, the internet doesn’t work the same for everyone, as some people have abilities that others don’t, which means some have disabilities. That’s an unfortunate reality of humanity, and one which we, as humane and caring individuals, should do as much as reasonably possible to ameliorate.

Instead, the government passed a law, and now, those videos are gone.

This has spawned two distinct cottage industries, one to create accommodations for people with disabilities and one to seek out and sue public accommodations that fall short.

The lawsuits came one after the other, against Fordham University, Manhattan College, Long Island University and other area colleges and universities. Continue reading →

Our mean-ass host, in a recent tweet, wrote: “John Thompson will suck your trust from the system but give it back in humanity. He was the real deal.”

Pictured below is that man. He recently died of a heart attack after serving 14 years on death row but, happily, Thompson was a free man when he passed.

Thompson’s demise prompts me to write this post regarding the obligation of prosecutors to turn over to the defense exculpatory information. His death also serves to remind judges like me that we need to avoid serving as potted plants. Continue reading →

If you are a State Supreme Court Justice issuing a press release on which areas of indigent representation reform the state’s highest court intends to back, it’s easy to shrug off calls of “bullshit” from the private bar. When the Public Defenders, the first line of defense for the poor in the state call bullshit, you might want to rethink your stance.

“The devil’s in the details,” Tennessee District Public Defenders Conference Executive Patrick Frogge said in an interview last week. “I’m glad the Supreme Court is taking some actions. The recommendations they’ve made in their press release share a common theme of steering more cases to public defenders. I’m not sure the recommendations carry with them a commiserate increase in the number of public defenders.” (Emphasis added.)

Frogge is correct in his analysis. The Tennessee Supremes want the public defenders’ offices to take on more cases. They don’t want to actually fund those offices or adequately staff them. They want the public defenders to take every case possible.

Mark Stephens, the head of Knox County’s public defender office, cut Chief Justice Bivins’ press release, and the work of the task force, straight to the bone. Continue reading →

It was nice to be invited by Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy and FIRE to join the audience to hear four academics talk about diverse viewpoints on campus. The panel consisted of April Kelly-Woessner, a political-science professor at Elizabethtown College, Samuel Abrams, a political-science professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Mark Lilla, a political-science professor at Columbia and Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU who now teaches at New York Law School.

It was all very . . . nice. If you knew nothing about what is happening on campus with students, faculty and administration silencing speech that fails to comport with progressive orthodoxy, you would leave far better informed than you came. It was . . . nice. As in, if we wish really hard for rainbows and unicorns to make things better, it could happen. Nice. Even the College Fix’s write-up of the presentation is nice.

“One person’s hate speech is somebody else’s cherished speech,” and what one person finds hurtful may galvanize another to engage with more speech, said Strossen, who testified at a July congressional hearing on campus free speech.

She told an audience member that a good way to get people to support free speech is to present them with an example of their own opinions getting censored.

Continue reading →

Everything that touches Kareem Bellamy’s world seems to turn ugly. His trial was ugly. The 14 years he spent in prison for murder was, naturally, horribly ugly. The vacating of his conviction and release, ugly, ugly, ugly. Four months after Judge Joel Blumenfeld vacated Bellamy’s murder conviction based on a taped confession by another guy to the murder, it turned out the tape was a phony. Ugly.

And now on appeal before the Second Circuit, challenging the dismissal on summary judgment of his suit for damages for a cool prosecution trick performed by the Queens County District Attorneys office of maintaining a Chinese wall between the handling of snitches and the prosecutors trying cases, it’s ugly yet again.

Prosecutors have absolute immunity from liability for their actions in their prosecutorial function, because the Supreme Court fears the floodgate will open and they will flee the courtroom, and the DA’s office, in tears if they were ever held accountable, even for the most intentional and egregious wrongdoing. If that were to happen, they might be hesitant in their zeal to shoot fish in barrels and society would devolve to anarchy. So prosecutors must be protected at all costs.

But there remained one tiny crack where prosecutors could be liable, based on their actions in an investigative capacity rather than the performance of their prosecutorial function.* Bellamy argued, inter alia, that the concealment of Brady material, of benefits conferred on witnesses against him at trial, was an administrative policy rather than a prosecutorial policy. EDNY Judge Ann Donnelly said “nope, ain’t happening.” Continue reading →

Despite my having little good to say about the Marshall Project, a point raised by criminal defense lawyer, activist and producer, David Menschel, evoked a response by lawprof Carissa Hessick that piqued my interest.

Both have a point. While the Pulitzer hook isn’t at all what one might suspect, it coming by dint of a MP writer riding the coattails of ProPublica, and the vast majority of the content at the Marshall Project being of the tear-jerker, legally vapid, sort that’s become so popular with the homebound and terminally unemployed, during the hours General Hospital isn’t on the air, are they an organ of the #Resistance, are they legitimate journalism or are they . . . something else? Continue reading →

She may not be Roxane Gay, but the newest New York Times Columnist, Michelle Goldberg, is on a roll.

Credit Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, for momentarily snapping us out of it. On Sunday evening, after a Twitter feud with Trump, Corker gave an interview to The New York Times in which he said publicly what Republican officeholders usually say only privately. Trump, Corker told the reporters Jonathan Martin and Mark Landler, is treating the presidency like “a reality show” and could be setting the nation “on the path to World War III.”

Corker has come out publicly and said what most sentient people already knew. But by raising the “path to World War III,” he raised the specter of Donald Trump with his finger on the nukes. Much as I hesitate to use the word that’s been reduced to a level of triteness challenged only by “rape,” this is horrifying. But then, Trump is the president. We elected an incompetent, irrational, probably mentally-unstable narcissist president, and the nuclear code comes with the job.

This is, of course, a problem of monumental proportions. And as with all such problems, there is a solution that is simple, clear and totally wrong. Goldberg cries that Corker’s admissions aren’t good enough, and that he and the Republicans in Congress must now act upon his statements by neutering Trump. Continue reading →

It would seem unremarkable that a state legislator would be asked to give a presentation at a law school. But for Texas Representative Briscoe Cain, his invitation by the Federalist Society to speak at Texas Southern was quite remarkable.

“Today I attended an event scheduled by the TSU chapter of the Federalist Society a few months ago. I was greeted by campus officials, given a guest parking voucher, and brought into a room in which the administration had specifically requested the talk occur. Then Black Lives Matter came in and bullied the administration into ending the event. It’s a sad day for universities across Texas whenever speech and a variety of views are prevented from being presented due to bullies.”

But it gets worse.

Rep. Cain was invited to the Thurgood Marshall School of Law by the Federalist Society to talk to the students about the recent legislative special session. Instead, the event was shut down before it even started. Continue reading →

It is the exceedingly rare sentencing where I do not receive and read letters of support. I roughly estimate that I have read between 30,000 and 40,000 letters over the past twenty-three years. In one case alone, I read 107 letters.

For some very odd and unknown reason in our district, the Northern District of Iowa, these letters have always been referred to by everyone but me as “unsolicited letters.” That always makes me chuckle, because I, and my colleagues nation-wide, do receive unsolicited letters, but they start very differently than the letters on behalf of offenders. My favorite was years ago and received just before Christmas. Here is how it started:

Dear Judge Bennett,

I hope you nigger loving anti-American communist Jew lover have a nice Christmas.

It went downhill from there.* Continue reading →

In obtaining an injunction from United States District Judge for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Matthew Brann, on behalf of a Penn State pre-med student found responsible for sexual assault, lawyers for John Doe, the male student burned by Penn State, learned that he should anticipate a positive determination going forward. There was a “likelihood” that he would prevail on the merits.

Penn State understood that part of the decision too.

A three-member Title IX panel in June found Doe violated the Student Code of Conduct by engaging in nonconsensual sex with a coed in the same seven-year pre-med program that is affiliated with Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He denies the allegations.

Brann, in granting the preliminary injunction , found Penn State had violated its procedures in adjudicating Doe and he had the likelihood of success in his due process claims.

If you’re the attorney for John Doe, having raised the full panoply of due process failures, from the investigation carefully designed to burn the accused to the denial of due process at the hearing, this relief is huge. If you’re the federal judge before whom the case is pending, you’ve foreshadowed the outcome and told the defendants that they blew it. Just how badly has yet to be determined, but it won’t be pretty. Continue reading →