It’s impossible to blame Daniel Szalkiewicz for doing what was in his client’s best interests. And from the description, what happened to his Jane Doe sounds horrible.

A 27-year-old Bronx woman sued the blogging site in Manhattan Supreme Court last week after a tape of her having sex with her boyfriend 10 years ago, when she was just 17, was posted in December and shared 1,200 times.

The post included the woman’s name and a link to her Facebook page.

She only learned that the private X-rated video was on the site when strange men started contacting her through Facebook with obscene messages such as, “Did you like the way his c–k felt? Sure looks like you did.”

Nice, guy. This is why you spend your time on Tumblr, because lines like this don’t endear you to actual living women. But as Julia Marsh at the New York Post explains, she didn’t take it lying down. Continue reading →

To paraphrase contrarian extraordinaire Christopher Hitchens, to describe this latest column from the Chicago Tribune as a piece of crap “would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental.” The column starts with a hyper-cynical version of what Alstory Simon went through:

For the last several years, Alstory Simon has had a good run in the media.

His version of an important local story — devious critics of the justice system hoodwinked me into confessing to a double murder I didn’t commit in order to get the real killer off death row and undermine capital punishment — has become the dominant narrative.

A better starting point would’ve been, “For 15 years, 8 months, Alstory Simon had a horrible run in the justice system. During that time, he was locked up 23 hours a day for a crime he did not commit.”

When Simon was finally exonerated, the proprietor of this space wrote about it, about how the deeply passionate Northwestern University’s Medill Innocence Project – led by a journalist — tricked and coerced Simon into confessing to a crime he did not commit in order to save one of their own, whose name is Anthony Porter. Continue reading →

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

–President Donald J. Trump to F.B.I. Director James Comey

So that settles that, right? In a pop-up symposium at Politico, fourteen lawyers and academics gave their views, ranging from Larry Tribe’s view that it conclusively proves guilt to Eugene Kontorovich’s view that it conclusively proves innocence.

Nobody suggested that Trump’s words were appropriate, which House Speaker Paul Ryan explains away as just his lack of knowledge of governance and protocol. Hey, the guy doesn’t know anything about how government works, about what a president is allowed to say to an F.B.I. director, so he stupidly crossed some lines. He’s a dope, but not a criminal.

The neo-SJW late of SDNY, Preet Bharara, calls that “silly,” because he wants to be relevant.

Silly. DJT knew protocol well enough to attack, rally after campaign rally, the breach of “protocol” in Clinton’s tarmac meeting with Lynch.

Of course, somebody could have just told that to Trump. For his part, Comey heard the words and felt them to be a “direction.” Continue reading →

Oh, Linda Greenhouse, doing her best to sow the seeds of discontent in the judiciary toward Darth Cheeto on the eve of Comey’s Senate testimony.

Sixty-eight years ago, in Watts v. State of Indiana, the Supreme Court overturned a murder conviction on the ground that the defendant’s confession had been coerced. The case is not much known today because it was overtaken two decades later by Miranda v. Arizona. That landmark decision gave criminal suspects the right to the presence of a lawyer and meant that a six-day interrogation like the one Robert Watts endured on his own would thereafter be considered flatly unconstitutional, without the need for the detailed parsing of the facts that the court undertook.

Does she recite this obscure decision because of her deep concern for the welfare of defendants? Not exactly.

The Watts case nevertheless lives on for a single line in Justice Felix Frankfurter’s opinion for the court. “There comes a point,” Frankfurter wrote, “where this court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.”

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Perhaps the most basic reason for police not to engage in a car chase is the potential for harm to innocent bystanders. And for a 28-year-old guy, that harm came to pass when he swerved to avoid a collision.

City officials said Wednesday morning they have “serious concerns” about how police handled the pursuit that began sometime around 11 p.m. in the Greenville section of the city and ended about six miles away with an innocent man fighting for his life.

Leo Pinkston, 48, has been charged with aggravated assault and eluding in the crash. Police fired multiple shots at Pinkston about a mile down the road before the crash.

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District of Nebraska Senior Judge Richard G. Kopf, who presumably knows a secret or two, came out clearly against the current torrent of leaks from within the Executive Branch of government.

First, there is no excuse, none whatever, for leaks. And I say that with Nixon and “Deep Throat” (Mark Felt[1]) fully in mind. The ends do not justify the means. On this subject, there can be no equivocation.

It’s obvious that no organization, government included, can function effectively with its personnel betraying the confidences of their superiors, including disclosure of classified materials. On the other hand, as discussed in the particularly thoughtful comments, there is a well-founded concern that when government engages in impropriety, it would never be known but for the willingness of a leaker to do the dirty.

The conundrum is clear. Both sides have strong points, and it ultimately provides an unsatisfying middle ground that lacks sufficient definition to distinguish the righteous leaker from the rat. In the absence of a clear line, Judge Kopf offered his considerations on where the equities fall: Continue reading →

You do not need to be a Trump supporter to decry the tsunami of leaks coming from government higher-ups or those merely working for the government. It seems that virtually everyone who lives in Washington, D.C. is or wants to be a leaker.

I have two thoughts regarding leaks. Briefly, here they are. Continue reading →

June is Gay Pride Month in remembrance of the Stonewall Rebellion. There were riots in response to a police raid of a gay bar in Greenwich Village that, ironically, was owned by the mob, The Stonewall Inn. That was 1969, and it’s credited with giving rise to the Gay Rights Movement, so that gay, lesbian and trans people could be open about their sexual orientation without fear of arrest.

Arrest. Prosecution. Imprisonment. While the protesters needed support for the cause on the streets, when they found themselves in the bowels of 100 Centre Street, they needed something else. They need lawyers.

It’s fitting that the New York City Legal Aid Society’s LGBTQ Caucus recognize Pride Month. Yet, instead of honoring the spirit of the Stonewall Riots, not to mention the reason the Legal Aid Society exists, they have a very different concern: “resistance” to their delicate feelings.

Subject: LGBTQ Caucus Statement on Pride Month at The Legal Aid Society Continue reading →

I was backpacking through Europe, having just been handed a college diploma, facing a haircut and future of misery in law school.  Lawprof Steve Vladeck had yet to be born. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote an opinion that, even then, was edgy and controversial, Smith v. Maryland.

Technology allowed the government to wiretap our telephones, to listen in to our private conversations, and it was troubling. Back then, there was a very firm, very clear appreciation of privacy, and the idea that law enforcement could listen in bordered on shocking. Statutes were enacted to strictly limit the use of eavesdropping. Not only was a warrant required, but the ancillary requirements were strict, and the government was expressly required to strictly adhere to them. There was no fudging around the edges of a Title III warrant.

Another technology also came into play. Originally called a “trap and trace device,” it later became known as a pen register. Its capacity was limited to capturing the telephone number called or calling in.  Continue reading →

The cost of warehousing prisoners in California is high. By high, I mean incredibly expensive.

The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year. That’s enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer.

This is totally true, provided you drink domestic beer and aren’t too demanding about toppings on your pizza. It’s also the sort of comparison that shallow people conflate with actual alternatives rather than a shocking metric.

At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard https://t.co/g06HJsDZyC

— deray mckesson (@deray) June 5, 2017

Continue reading →