The thrust of Steven Chapman’s argument, that there are alternatives to cops conducting physical traffic stops that would go a long way in eliminating the potential for violence, whether to a cop or to the motorist, is certainly a worthy topic for discussion. The predicate for his argument, however, is a sham.

Too often, traffic stops lead to tragedy. Philando Castile was shot to death in his car by a police officer in Minnesota. Last week, a mistrial was declared for a University of Cincinnati officer prosecuted for killing 43-year-oldSamuel DuBose, whose car had a missing front license plate. Sandra Bland, yanked out of her car by a Texas state trooper after allegedly failing to signal a lane change, died in jail. All three victims were black.

Data is not the plural of anecdote. Three instances are three too many, and the vague words, “too often,” may be existentially accurate, but wholly uninformative. One instance could be “too often,” but it doesn’t validate the claim.

Cops are also at risk. In March, a police officer died in a shootout with a passenger who ran from a car that had been pulled over in Tecumseh, Okla. In June, a police lieutenant was fatally gunned down after a stop in Newport, Ark.

When an officer stops and approaches a vehicle, both the cop and the driver are vulnerable. Any wrong move or misjudgment can turn the encounter deadly.

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Not that I’m an aficionado of rap music (I’m not), but Rob Hustle is killing it on Youtube.

Music, like humor, is an extraordinarily effective means of communicating a message that may be a bit too tedious to read about. Just as Jay-Z did with 99 Problems, and Rob Hustle did with his last video, Call the Cops,* he does it again here. Great stuff like this deserves as much play as possible, and I am thrilled and honored to do what I can to help Rob Hustle get the eyeballs he deserves.

*This video appears somewhere on SJ, though a quick search failed to find it. If anybody can tell me what post it was, it would be appreciated.

Patrick Frey announced on his blog, Patterico’s Pontifications, that he finally prevailed in the lawfare against him by Brett Kimberlin. He gave credit to the lawyers who defended him:

It is a total and complete victory. There will be no trial. I will pay nothing. I will take down no blog posts about Kimberlin. The lawsuit is simply over. (Of course, he’ll appeal. He always appeals.)

My deepest thanks go to my pro bono counsel: Ron Coleman of Archer & Greiner and the Likelihood of Confusion blog, and Bruce Godfrey of Jezic & Moyse LLC.

I can’t say enough about these guys. They stood by me at all times, working for no pay — all for the righteous cause of defending free speech. Ron Coleman juggled this case with his internationally known pro bono case for the Slants, which resulted in total victory and a landmark opinion for free speech. In addition to his fine legal work with Ron on the briefs, Bruce Godfrey dealt with a prickly and difficult client (that’s me!) on discovery issues, and spent countless hours cataloguing, redacting, and organizing the voluminous discovery — not to mention dealing with the court and Kimberlin, and navigating me and Ron through the Maryland legal world.

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In an op-ed emblematic of the times, Eileen Zimmerman recounts the fall of her ex-husband, Peter, into addiction and, ultimately death. Having spent a good deal of time discussing, and learning, from my dear pal, Brian Cuban, about the walls that make it hard, if not impossible, for an addicted lawyer to seek help, it’s easy to appreciate why a lawyer who falls into that dark hole of drugs or alcohol feels that there is no way out.

But there is a secondary question behind the myriad problems with a lawyer overcoming the pressures and incentive to conceal his problem. While there may be no reason why lawyers would be any more immune to the causes that turn someone into an addict, are lawyers more prone to addiction?

The plural of anecdotes is not data (I know, but it’s still true). There are a lot of lawyers out there. Ten, one hundred, one thousand sad stories are sad, but don’t prove much. Nor do surveys add much to the mix:

Illicit drug use, however, is illegal. “I think the incidence of drug use and abuse is significantly underreported,” he said.

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Upon first glance, it reeks of Buck v. Bell, the eugenics that was once deemed acceptable in America. After all, aren’t three generations of idiots enough? But is it the same?

A judge in White County, Tennessee has issued a standing order offering a 30-day reduction in jail time to male inmates who get vasectomies and female inmates who get a Nexplanon implant in their arms. The ACLU of Tennessee has issued the following statement in response.

“Offering a so-called ‘choice’ between jail time and coerced contraception or sterilization is unconstitutional. Such a choice violates the fundamental constitutional right to reproductive autonomy and bodily integrity by interfering with the intimate decision of whether and when to have a child, imposing an intrusive medical procedure on individuals who are not in a position to reject it. Judges play an important role in our community – overseeing individuals’ childbearing capacity should not be part of that role.”

There’s a lot of presumption packed into that statement. Is it a “so-called ‘choice'”? Is it “coerced contraception or sterilization”? Is it unconstitutional? Continue reading →

I consider myself fortunate for having never seen a search warrant for a woman’s vagina. It’s hard to conceive what would be alleged that would make any sense to a rational judge. Assuming there was a snitch with proven reliability providing information that a particular woman regularly concealed narcotics in her vagina, it would fail to show probable cause that at any specific moment, there were drugs in there.

At the same time, it would seek an intrusion into a person’s body for a purpose that was, at best, trivial. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the information is accurate. This isn’t a dirty bomb about to kill thousands of people, and Jack Bauer has 24 hours to stop the killing. It’s drugs. If they remain where they are, they don’t harm anyone. Not even by the chaos theory employed by drug warriors to justify why drugs are literally violence.

If a person is dealing drugs, they eventually have to come out of a bodily orifice and be exchanged. Nail them, if you must. Society is saved and you get a medal. And not only did you pinch the dame for a more serious crime, but you didn’t have to take the deep dive.

Of course, if the woman doesn’t have drugs in her vagina, whether at all or at the moment you search, then cops didn’t get a free pass to intrude into a person’s body because a judge said so. Continue reading →

Sitting by the pool during summer office hours, Dr. Sj handed me the book she was reading and told me, “read the introduction. You’re going to like this.” The book was “The Gatekeepers” by Chris Whipple. She was right. I liked it. I only got as far as the intro before Dr. SJ took it back from me, but the seed was planted.

The book is about the role of White House Chief of Staff. It’s an odd position, in that there is no law establishing the post, it’s not subject to senate confirmation and there’s no requirement that it exist. Jimmy Carter had no chief of staff at the beginning of his presidency. But the intro is about 15 of the 17 living Chiefs meeting Rahm Emanuel* before Obama was sworn in to give him some advice.

It was a very curious crew, ranging from Dick Cheney to Jim Baker. Yet, they put politics aside, save for a few cutting jokes, and focused on the job. Regardless of where they stood politically, they understood that a failed presidency meant harm to Americans. They were bigger than that, even if they completely disagreed with the political course.

The point of the introduction was twofold: first that a president who lacked a good Chief of Staff was likely to fail. Second, and more importantly, the job of Chief of Staff was to be the guy who told the president when he was wrong. Continue reading →

The banks and brokerage houses nearly brought America down in the crash of 2008, and yet the United States Department of Justice couldn’t manage to find anyone to prosecute. Like almost anyone paying a little bit of attention to criminal law, finance or who breathed, Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica writer, Jesse Eisinger, was pissed. So he sought to find out how this grave injustice could have happened. And that may be the mistake, even if it’s unavoidable.

Eisinger’s new book, The Chickenshit Club, Why the Justice Department Failed to Prosecute Executives, from Simon & Schuster,* dives into the huge question with one thing certain: that the failure to prosecute anyone was a failure of justice. Eisinger doesn’t hide his politics, and that bankers and businessmen are presumed guilty permeates the book. It’s not that it’s an unfair assumption, given what happened, but that his search never seriously considers that maybe the DoJ was not merely a bunch of cowards, but could just be wrong about who’s a criminal.

If you’re interested in the feel, the smell, the sense of what inside baseball is like in federal criminal law, to some extent, and the Justice Department in general, Eisinger does a spectacular job of providing a rich and deep background. It might seem overly banal to the casual reader, but that’s only because it is in real life. Take away the gloss of the cameras and the feigned heroics pumped out by the media, and you see regular people doing their jobs. Eisinger paints a rich tapesty of the world inside Justice. For this alone, the book is one of the most insightful I’ve read. This is the real deal, no shade to clean up the nasty people for their close-up.

But I kept having to remind myself, this was not a book about whether there were crimes committed by bankers, accountants and businessmen, but about how Justice went from the over-reaching cowboys of Enron days to the lily-livered corporate apologists of Lanny Breuer’s “Breu Crew.” I kept waiting for Eisinger to question whether there might be some potential that assumptions, leaps of faith really, that a vague email didn’t conclusively prove guilt. Continue reading →

A young man, who shall remain nameless as he reached out to me in confidence, expressed dismay upon learning that a pseudonymous twitterer, whose bio claimed to be a criminal defense lawyer, spewed some social justice idiocy at him and, upon his challenging the belief, dismissed him. How could a criminal defense lawyer, one who followed him on the twitters, perhaps liked or retwitted him, be such a dope?

Putting aside the issue of who was the jerk, as that’s not really an important element of this exchange, the question posed raises what was once tacitly accepted and understood to be the reality of social media. Just because you follow someone on the twitters, or friend them on Facebook, does not mean you know them.

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Someone lied and I passed it along to you. First and foremost, I apologize. I accepted a representation as true, and it was not. Second, I must atone for my sin by clearing it up. I wrote about the new exclusionary rule at Harvard, I wrote about a report that held itself out as reflecting the majority opinion of its group to eradicate all exclusive groups at the college and punish any student who would defy the ban.

A small minority argued that there should be no formal policy on the USGSOs, championing instead freedom of association. That is to say, they proposed that neither the current policy nor the proposed policy should be entertained. In some cases, they also urged that the USGSOs be permitted to remain single-gender if they wish. The Committee considered the importance of allowing our students to select their own social spaces and friends, but we also recognize principles such as inclusiveness and equality, which many members of the Harvard community consider of paramount importance to our mission.

While it doesn’t say so specifically, distinguishing the “small minority” from the otherwise clear view of the “committee” suggests that the vast majority supported the report. The Harvard Crimson investigated the claim in the report.

In its 22-page report, released July 12, the committee indicated that students and faculty had finally had their say—only a “small minority” of committee members heavily disputed the proposed social group ban, according to the document.

But the results of that May 12 vote—cast around 10:15 a.m. via paper ballot—tell a different story. Continue reading →