One of my basic quips here is that if you don’t like a post, you get your money back. The point, obviously, is that you read SJ for free if you so choose. Nobody makes you. You don’t have to like it, whether because you think the writing sucks or you just can’t stand the word “twit,” and you certainly don’t have to agree with anything I write. This is America and you can be as wrong as you wanna be.

But of late, I’ve noticed that donations to the cause have dwindled considerably. While I can see how many people read SJ, and the numbers remain remarkably robust, the lack of support is a little disconcerting. Continue reading →

There’s a requirement to be Humboldt County, California, Public Defender. It’s not a particularly hard requirement to meet, but apparently David Marcus, the current office holder, may have a problem.

Local attorney Patrik Griego refiled his lawsuit last week, alleging that Humboldt County Public Defender David Marcus fails to meet minimum state qualifications for his post. And this time, Griego is using Marcus’ own words against him in arguing that he is unqualified to represent the county’s indigent defendants as the chief public defender.

What is this onerous burden? Wait for it…

The heart of the suit rests on a section of the California Government Code that requires a public defender to have been “a practicing attorney in all the courts of the state for at least the year preceding the date of his election or appointment.”

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Did David Mueller lift up Taylor Swift’s skirt and grope her? It’s a fairly straightforward fact question. It either happened or not, and that’s the question of fact for the jury to decide. But Swift’s lawyer, Brian Schwalb of Venable, wasn’t willing to take the chance of an adverse finding, so he tried to gild the lily.

He proposed to introduce the “expert testimony” of University of Colorado Boulder gender studies prof Lorraine Bayard de Volo to “explain” Mueller’s masculine fragility.

De Volo is a Ph.D. women and gender studies prof, whose scholarship appears to focus on the intersection of gender and the Cuban Revolution. As such, she is a fully qualified expert to convey feminist mythology:

Sexual harassment and assault are fundamentally motivated by the perpetrator’s perceived need to assert power and to protect the perpetrator’s status. Throughout David Mueller’s pleadings in this lawsuit and his deposition testimony, he indicated that even before he met Ms.Swift, he felt his job security was threatened, his identity as a radio personality was threatened, and his masculinity was threatened. This perfect storm of threats to Mr. Mueller’s perceived status is consistent with the well-settled, academically-accepted, perceived threats to status that motivate a man to commit sexual harassment or assault.

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For those who yearn for the self-proclaimed Halcyon days of civil rights enforcement under Obama’s Department of Justice, it’s unfortunate that nobody told them that indigent defense in New Orleans was in ruins. No doubt newfound progressive icon Sally Yates would have been on it like Vanita Gupta was on transgender bathrooms. If only they knew.*

But the problems of spectacularly underfunded public defense in Louisiana was bad enough before. So prosecutors figured out a way to make it worse.

Jay Dixon was heading home from Baton Rouge to Lafayette one day when he got pulled over for speeding. As the deputy handed him the ticket, Dixon said, he was told to flip it over. On the back, Dixon found instructions saying he could pay the ticket by mailing a $175 money order made out to “DA P.T.D.”

If he paid the ticket that way, the deputy told him, it wouldn’t go on his record. Plus, it wouldn’t go through court, so he wouldn’t have to pay court costs.

“Who wouldn’t want to do it?” Dixon asked as he recounted what happened.

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Gabriel Cornejo has sex with a woman. It cost him more than a dinner.

In 2003, a child support court in Texas ruled that Gabriel Cornejo, 45, had to pay child support to his ex-girlfriend who had recently given birth because she vowed that there was no way he wasn’t the rightful dad.

And they want the $65,000 in back child support he owes, which hardly seems unreasonable. After all, you do the crime, you do the time, fatherhood edition. But the unnamed woman’s vow “that there was no way he wasn’t the rightful dad” may be deeply persuasive if one believes the survivor, except for this stuff called DNA.

Cornejo, a father who’s raising his own three kids and two nephews, said he found out about the child support payments when a deputy showed up at his door last year. The deputy gave Cornejo court papers that claimed the state of Texas thinks he has another child. Continue reading →

It doesn’t. It never did. It should, but you wouldn’t know that unless you were one of the few people who paid attention to things like law before evil descended on the land. The headline could just have easily read, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

The Justice Department has filed court papers arguing that a major federal civil rights law does not protect employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation, taking a stand against a decision reached under President Barack Obama.

This would be outrageous, but for one thing. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not include homosexuality as a protected class, and Congress has voted annually since 1974 not to amend it to do so. On the bright side, if they had, it would have been characterized as “sexual preference,” as the nation was not yet woke to the belief that sexual orientation was an immutable characteristic.

The cry is that Darth Cheeto’s beleaguered minion is gratuitously pushing his way into the Second Circuit to exert influence on a case between two private parties, where the EEOC has been invited to chime in. Continue reading →

According to a search warrant, Justine Damond “slapped” the patrol car before she was killed by Officer Mohammed Noor.

In the moments before a yoga teacher was fatally shot by Minneapolis police, a woman slapped the officers’ patrol car while it drove through an alley, according to a search warrant application filed this week.

Though the information in the warrant is vague, it could explain the “loud sound” that reportedly startled Officers Matthew Harrity, the cruiser’s driver, and Officer Mohamed Noor, who was in the front passenger seat, just before Noor shot 40-year-old Justine Damond. Harrity described the noise to investigators.

The ridicule for such a lame justification was manifest in signs put up in protest around the Twin Cities, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be argued as sufficient to justify the kill. Continue reading →

One of the mantras of the defense at trial is that it only takes one to hang a jury. The assumption is that the one juror, the brave, bold soul who will stand up to the others, will be on our side. This is not necessarily the case, as Matthew Ness learned in the aftermath of his defense of Jerry Chai.

A California man convicted last month of having improper sexual contact with a Seton Hill University coed wants a new trial, contending that a juror used personal knowledge as part of the deliberations.

Defense attorney Matthew Ness said his client, Jerry Chai, 27, was wrongly convicted of a misdemeanor count of indecent assault after a juror convinced other panel members to issue the guilty verdict based on information that was not part of the evidence in the case.

The underlying allegations are routine: Continue reading →

I am still chuckling about making the Appellate Twitters  explode with angry twits (I mean tweets) about my advice to young practicing lawyers not to complain about work/life imbalance (and lots of other stuff that the twitters (tweeters?) ignored). In that vein, as my daughter, her husband and my three grandchildren, all from China, are here, I am obligated to show up at home.

After all, down deep where the wild things are, I am a true believer in work/life balance particularly because (1) I now have no clients to blow off and (2) I also no longer have a child whose psychosexual development will be grievously impaired if I absent myself from an award ceremony where a prestigious participation trophy will be presented. Of course, and because I love it so, I will make time for sending folks to prison.

The foregoing explained, this is a roundabout way of telling you that this post will be short. Here goes.

Attorney General Sessions* has decided to reinvigorate the war on drugs. That is slightly stunning because, according to leakers[i]; he has been extremely busy giving away the nuclear codes to the Russians. I don’t know where he finds the time. Anyway, the reinvigoration of the war on drugs by Sessions stimulated my aging synapses and the following spilled out. Continue reading →

When J.K. Rowling announced a new Harry Potter-esque book, Anil Dash took to the twitters to complain: there was no character in Harry Potter who looked like his son. I replied, “so write a Harry Potter story and create a character who looks like your son.” Dash didn’t appreciate my suggestion. Other people who create things should do so to suit his desires.

Roxane Gay, who remains under suspicion of dog killing because the absence of evidence is more than enough proof in her world, took to the op-ed pages of the Times (in an otherwise appreciated respite for why Trump is literally Hitler) because there is a television show she does not want to watch.

HBO last week announced it was willing to expend this energy with a series from the “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. In the show, “Confederate,” the South does, indeed, secede from the Union, the Mason-Dixon line is a demilitarized zone and slavery is the law of the land below it. Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman, black television writers and producers, are also attached to the project. They have an incredible body of work behind them and will no doubt bring their considerable expertise to this show.

When I first read about “Confederate,” however, I felt exhausted, simply because I have long been exhausted by slavery narratives. That’s a personal preference, not a metric by which art should or should not be created.

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