One of the few issues in criminal law that is close to universally condemned is over-criminalization, that there are too many laws, too many crimes.  And yet, when someone hated walks away from conviction, the same voices that decry the problem call for more laws because they can’t stand the fact that one got away.  Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship was hated. Don Blankenship walked away.

The verdict reached by a federal jury here made Mr. Blankenship, 65, the most prominent American coal executive ever to be convicted of a charge connected to the deaths of miners. He had been accused of conspiring to violate mine safety regulations, as well as of deceiving investors and regulators; prosecutors secured a conviction on only one of the three charges. Mr. Blankenship was acquitted of making false statements and securities fraud.

So in truth, he didn’t quite walk, but to those who wanted Blankenship convicted for the deaths of 29 miners who died in the Upper Big Branch mine, he did. Coal mining has always been notoriously dangerous. John L. Lewis, the perennial president of the United Mine Workers and founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, always hoped that coal mining would be eradicated, realizing there was no possibility of its ever being sufficiently safe for humans. Continue reading →

Remember Baby Bou Bou?

There could have, there should have, been a prosecution of the police officers who did this by throwing a flash bang grenade into 2-year-old Bounkham “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh’s crib in a mistaken SWAT raid. There wasn’t.

But there were still the lies in the reports to cover up this crime.  Ken Womble’s modest proposal at Fault Lines was that we start with the lies, the perjury, designed to conceal police officers who do harm. Continue reading →

There’s a reason why discussions with feminists about sexism never seem to go anywhere. It’s not that they don’t want to talk about it. Oh, they want to talk. It’s that their idea of talking about gender discrimination requires men to accept their language, concepts, excuses and feelz as a prerequisite to what they deem meaningful discussion.

There is no room in the discussion for disagreement. They want to talk at you, not with you. If the basis of the discussion isn’t their view of the world, you’re immediately branded a privileged cis-hetero-normative misogynstic rape-apologist shitlord.  The rationale is clear; it’s because they’re right, you’re wrong, and this forms the basis for any fruitful discussion. Absent acceptance of their premise, you (not they) have refused to engage.

And this worthless effort is repeating itself, this time with race.

At Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler posted about a “dust-up” at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law that arose after a student wrote a highly controversial op-ed. Continue reading →

A couple of weeks ago, Chicago mayor and former right hand to the president, Rahm Emanuel, did what a scoundrel naturally does when he gets caught: he threw his pal under the bus to try to save his own skin.  Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy went from a lead role in the play about police reform to mutt.  A month earlier, he was one of the bold-faced names in the scam of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, then boom, he’s gone.

It’s not that McCarthy didn’t deserve to be thrown under the bus, but that Rahm deserved it as well. More, actually, given that Rahm’s desk is where the buck stopped, and Rahm’s promise was to clean up the mess.  But promises are words, and words mean nothing if a mayor is held to account for them.

Was it possible that Rahm Emanuel didn’t know that his police department, his city, was fighting to the death to prevent disclosure of a video showing a black kid murdered in the street?  Is it too harsh, too presumptive, to believe that the mayor was complicit in this cover-up of murder?

Nope.  Because he’s doing it again. And after the fallout of Laquan McDonald, there is no possibility that Rahm is in the dark. Continue reading →

Once I got over my initial hatred of twitter, I came to the realization it required a level of discipline that many have never known, and certainly never demonstrated.  And that allows others to recognize them for what they are.

Some twitterers post their message in serial twits, taking three or six twits to make a single point.  They miss the point of twitter. They refuse to accept the nature of a twit, limited by 140 characters, and insist on using every word in their arsenal no matter how many twits it takes.  These are often the same folks who find the 3000 word limit on comments intolerably limiting.

Some twitterers use abbreviations to cut down on characters, such as “U” for “you”.  This is perfectly acceptable if you remain below the age of majority, but for twitterers of a certain age, it’s about as intellectually satisfying as a faux leopard-skin miniskirt.  They may not say so, but serious people laugh at you.  No, they really do.

Some twitterers send out twits that just don’t make much sense.  Sometimes it’s because the end of their thought is cut off.  Other times it’s because they, well, just don’t make much sense for organic reasons.

Continue reading →

Many years ago, Dr. SJ and I took a trip to Dannemora, New York, a stone’s throw from the Canadian border.  The eight-seat plane had to circle before landing because there was a cow on the runway, and somebody had to shoo it away.  We were there for a wedding, a college friend of Dr. SJ’s.  Her husband was a corrections officer at Clinton Correctional Facility. Pretty much everybody in Dannemora works in a prison.

It was an impoverished area, with little reason to exist outside of warehousing New York City convicts.  At the wedding, held in the one-room VFW Hall, where drinks were available from a vending machine provided you had spare change, we met a lot of prison guards.  They all seemed nice enough to us. They were all white.  They liked their jobs, but not so much the prisoners.

We talked about it, given that I was a city criminal defense lawyer and they were the guys who would watch over the next decade or so of my clients’ lives. They were fairly matter-of-fact about what they did during the day. They did a job, and had no intention of taking any crap from the convicts. They were not going to spend any time or empathy worrying about prisoners being human beings. It’s not that they had any hatred toward them, but that they had no empathy either. Continue reading →

“Nobody is perfect” is a facile excuse made by someone who screwed up.  And it works because it appeals to our biases. I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. So why should cops be “perfect”?  Except the problem isn’t that cops weren’t perfect, but that they were failures. Massive, huge, inexplicable failures.  The De Kalb County police officers who responded to a possible burglary call aspired to be “not perfect.”

Shortly after 7:30 p.m. Monday, three DeKalb County police officers were dispatched to a burglary call on Boulderwoods Drive, just off Bouldercrest Road, about a mile south of I-20. Derek Perez, the man who made the 911 call, wrote on Facebook that he’d told police about a possible burglar outside of “the farthest house at the end of the street.”

The officers, however, stopped at Chris and Leah McKinley’s home — the second house on the street — because it matched the “physical description” given, according to a release from the GBI.

The scenario begins with a possible crime at a possible location.  It’s all possible. What it’s not is definitive.  When something is possible but not certain, there are two ways for police to approach it.  The first is slowly, with caution, to investigate and ascertain what is happening so that they can take the appropriate action as they gain information upon which to make reasoned determinations of what that action might be. Continue reading →

While screams of racism rang out following Nino Scalia’s ham-handed question during oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas II, the more interesting, and far more difficult, question was posed by Chief Justice John Roberts.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?

There was a quick and unhelpful retort that the nation’s foremost astrophysicist and all-around badass, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, happens to be black, but that doesn’t actually answer anything.  A group of STEM academics reacted by writing an open letter to the Supreme Court.

Justice Roberts asked, “what unique perspective does a minority student bring to physics class?” and “What [are] the benefits of diversity… in that situation?” Before addressing these questions directly, we note that [it] is important to call attention to questions that weren’t asked by the justices, such as, “What unique perspectives do white students bring to a physics class?” and “What are the benefits of homogeneity in that situation?” We reject the premise that the presence of minority students and the existence of diversity need to be justified, but meanwhile segregation in physics is tacitly accepted as normal or good. Instead, we embrace the assumption that minority physics students are brilliant and ask, “Why does physics education routinely fail brilliant minority students?”

Continue reading →

Police in Scotland manage to do two things that American cops don’t. They go to work without a gun strapped to their waist and go home for dinner without having killed anyone that day.  A program that seems remarkably obvious, yet hasn’t happened until now, brought American cops to Scotland to learn how this could possibly be.

But a difference long curious to Americans stands out: Most British police officers are unarmed, a distinction particularly pronounced here in Scotland, where 98 percent of the country’s officers do not carry guns. For them, calming a situation through talk, rather than escalating it with weapons, is an essential policing tool, and one that brought a delegation of top American police officials to this town 30 miles northeast of Glasgow.

That 98% of Scottish police are unarmed seems crazy, and begets the obvious question.

“How many officers in Scotland have been killed in the last year or two years?” Chief Shortell added. Continue reading →

Among the cool stuff that you never see on your side of the computer screen are the shills. Write a post critical of cops or police unions, and suddenly a bunch of lengthy comments appear from people who have never commented before offering some nonsensical rationale for the conduct, together with some similarly nonsensical attack on me for being critical.

There’s a fun game I play, where I google the content of the comment, and see how many other blogs or articles include the exact same words, the exact same comment, under miscellaneous names like “John,” or “Robert.”  The reader won’t be clear on how I know a comment comes from a shill, trolling the web in search of criticism and offering this carefully crafted comment prepared by a publicist to blunt the edge of criticism.  But I’m clear. I have mad skillz.

In time, and with experience, you can spot the shills quickly. Sometimes, it’s one or two comments. Sometimes it’s dozens. Sometimes, you get an actual person who acknowledges that he’s a rep of whomever is subject to criticism and wants to offer the other side’s position. I tend to post one pseudonymous shill comment just to point out when the shills are hard at work. Continue reading →