Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that the Department of Justice “will begin a far-ranging investigation into the patterns and practices of the Chicago Police Department, part of the continuing fallout over a video released last month showing the police shooting of Laquan McDonald.”  She heard the cries of people and pundits, that Chicago, a perennial cesspool of police misconduct and abuse, couldn’t fix itself. Even Rahm Emanuel supported the move, flipping and flopping in his effort to avoid the shit staining his mayor hat.

The Justice Department has long had concerns about the Chicago department. But the current scrutiny centers on a controversy that began with a two-paragraph statement a year ago from the Chicago Police Department about the death of a young black man who had been shot 16 times by the police.

That’s how we roll.  Complaints, from black interrogation sites to hundreds of killings of unarmed citizens with nary a prosecution, had been going on for years. Only when a bad enough story hits the front page does the machinery start to crank.

And then, a weird fog overcomes the demanded reaction.  When it comes to governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, impropriety, the federal government has taken its deserved punches.  So if it can’t clean itself up, what sort of delusion overcomes us to believe it’s suddenly got magic powers to clean up some other jurisdiction’s improprieties?  Continue reading →

Under the title, “Reclaim Harvard Law School,” a list of demands has been proffered.

For years, students and other members of the HLS community have called out for contextualized learning that draws connections between the law and social subordination based on race, gender, and class; for a more genuine commitment to rooting out racism and other forms of mistreatment on campus; for increased resources to welcome and support students from disadvantaged backgrounds; and for significantly greater transparency in decisions made by the administration. Those voices have largely gone unheard.

There could be a reason those voices have “largely gone unheard.” It’s a law school. Its mission is to teach its students the law so that they can become lawyers. Its mission is not to “contextualize learning,” whatever that means, “that draws connections between the law and social subordination based on race, gender, and class.”

Among the demands to achieve this goal is:

Address Harvard Law School’s legacy of slavery by removing the Royall family crest from Harvard Law School’s official seal and creating a permanent physical memorialization of the enslaved victims of the Royall family.

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Few among us could make the President of the United States of America do something. Anything. Yet, a 27-year-old named Tashfeen Malik was able to do so, making President Barack Obama take to the tube to give a speech to “calm jittery Americans.” All it took to wield such awesome power was a gun, ignorance and fear. She brought the first thing. We gave her the second and third. This was a toxic mix that could compel a president to do her bidding.

The cynics will respond that this is wrong, that President Obama didn’t give a speech because Malik forced him to do so, but because she gave him the opportunity to use the fear and ignorance that pervade our fragile consciousness for an ulterior purpose.  There is an agenda, and Malik was being used as a pawn in furtherance of the agenda, an excuse to do something that would otherwise not have had the impetus to move forward. Sometimes, the cynics are right, no matter what Oscar Wilde thinks of them.

Whether the New York Times was complicit in pushing this agenda forward with its front page editorial that gave rise to a national discussion isn’t clear. But it surely didn’t hurt.

Both the president and the Gray Lady have described the mass murder in San Bernardino as terrorism. Neither has given much consideration to the meaning of the word, since there has not as yet been a political objective suggested for Malik’s and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook’s, murders. As Jeff Gamso notes, we’re past such banal details now. It’s a given, meaning be damned. Continue reading →

In the face of stories of college administrators and professors caving in to, if not enabling, the infantile demands of unduly sensitive students, there was a gnawing question of whether there were any grown-ups left in the Academy.  There are, and even though they are faced with being called words that could destroy their careers, like sexist or racist, they have chosen not to acquiesce or remain silent.

The least I can do is applaud their willingness to come forward, to say, “enough,” given that I’ve been critical in the past of professors lacking the courage to call out intellectual dishonesty.  At PrawfsBlawg, Paul Horwitz began the ball rolling.

I have not seen The Hunting Ground and cannot comment on its merits. It seems worth noting, though, both that the movie is prominently features a case involving Harvard Law School, and that a number of professors at the law school issued a public letter criticizing both the film and its treatment of that incident. They charge in the letter that the documentary “provides a seriously false picture both of the general sexual assault phenomenon at universities” and of the student accused in that specific incident and the process in that case. The Times article also links to this critique of the film, and specifically its treatment of that case, by Emily Yoffe in Slate. Continue reading →

In a brazenly deceitful post at the Intercept, Lee Fang tried to spin a proposed bill to create the mens rea element of “knowing” as a minimum floor to federal prosecutions as a Koch Brothers conspiracy.  The crux of the argument was that if Charles and David Koch were in favor of the law, it must be for some evil purpose.  And indeed, the law would have been in the Koch Brothers’ best interest.

And your best interest. And my best interest. And in the best interest of every defendant or potential defendant.  Because a law without a mens rea requirement is a strict liability law, a law that one can be criminally convicted of violating without any ill-intent, without even knowledge, without any desire to be other than a good citizen, corporate or individual. The bludgeon of criminal prosecution was never meant to beat down anyone who meant no harm.

The inclusion of a mens rea requirement had never been controversial. Indeed, it was almost universally considered a minimum requirement for a crime, as it was what distinguished criminal conduct from conduct which might give rise to an unintended harmful result, but not conduct that was worthy of criminal punishment. Until now.

The New York Times has come out against the creation of a minimum mens rea element for all federal crimes. At first blush, this seems inconceivable, but then, the rationale for this stance is made very, sadly, clear.  Even more than it hates the wrongful prosecution and conviction of defendants, it hates corporations.  If a law will benefit corporations as well as individuals, then it’s a bad law. Continue reading →

For the first time since 1920, the New York Times has put an editorial on page A1, its front page.  The title explains why.

End the Gun Epidemic in America

On its face, it’s a flagrant appeal to emotion.  But then, it’s an issue wrapped in emotion. Death does that to people, as well it should.  So the Times plays to its audience, northeastern liberals who have neither use for, nor love of, guns, and the heart-rending spectacle of a mass murder.

​It is a moral outrage and national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.

The deliberate choice of framing its position as a moral outrage immediately tells the story that this isn’t intended as a reasoned argument, but one that goes to the bottom line of public sensibilities.  What is “moral” is a personal issue. Either you agree that it is or you don’t. Continue reading →

Within the sphere of people who are unquestionably venal for their conduct of deliberately harming women for a profit through revenge porn, Hunter Moore is up there, a disgusting face in the pantheon of scum.  Far more so than the intellectually dishonest who would eviscerate free speech by criminalizing revenge porn, guys like Moore are responsible for driving the need to end the blight.

Sarah Jeong writes that Moore was sentenced for his conduct, for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, for the intentional harm he caused.

On Wednesday, revenge porn site operator Hunter Moore was sentenced to two and a half years in federal prison. He will also be paying a $2,000 fine, and on top of that, a bizarrely specific $145.70 in restitution.

$145.70: the price of being a revenge porn victim.

The term of imprisonment was one thing; the amount of restitution, on the other hand, bred outrage. Continue reading →

How cool is it that a lawyer can write a tell-all book after his involvement in a huge, high-profile case?  Not cool at all, actually.   Not that Kirk Nurmi wasn’t rip-roaring to go about how much he hated representing Jodi Arias, how horrible, inappropriate and twisted she was.  Was it all that anger that needed to get out?  Was it that he wanted to parlay an unpleasant experience into turning himself into a big name? Was it for the money?

Who knows, but in the process, Kirk Nurmi did what a lawyer cannot do. He violated confidentiality.

Jodi Arias’ former lawyer, Kirk Nurmi, writes in his newly released book that he was forced to represent a manipulative and intimidating client who was sexually inappropriate and “very disturbed.”

He explains the title of the book, “Trapped with Ms. Arias,” in the introduction, saying the five-year case took an emotional toll on him and prompted him to give up his job at the public defender’s office just to get away from Arias – a move the courts ultimately shot down by ordering him to stay on the case.

“Once I had a sense of where this case was going, I was willing to give up a job … simply to get away from Ms. Arias, and when I did not get away, I realized that I was truly trapped on her case, which also meant I was trapped with her,” Nurmi wrote.

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The San Francisco Examiner provides the backstory from Police Chief Greg Suhr:

About 45 minutes before the police shooting, a victim who had been stabbed in the shoulder walked into San Francisco General Hospital and described his assailant. The victim is expected to survive.

The officers were just wrapping up their search for the suspect when other officers found him on the 2900 block of Keith, between Gilman and LeConte avenues, Suhr said. The man was reportedly armed with the kitchen knife police believe was used in the stabbing.

The officers convened and told the man to drop his weapon, Suhr said. Witnesses on a nearby bus reportedly confirmed the exchange to police.

The police were confronted with a man with a kitchen knife who had already demonstrated that he was willing to use it.  While he was certainly close enough to the police that he could attack them, they were similarly close enough to him to put themselves in the putative zone of danger.  They ordered him to drop his weapon. He did not.

Instead, it appears that he tried to walk away. Continue reading →

Well before facts were known, there were cries for denying guns to “terrorists” as the cure to mass murder.  It began when the shooters were characterized as “three white” people, which made some argue that the only reason for reluctance to call this terrorism was that the shooters didn’t have brown skin and funny names.

But then, it turned out they did, when it was revealed that the shooters were Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, so the arguments immediately flipped around for those determined to push their political and racial agendas no matter what.

And in jumped Senator Diane Feinstein with a bill to deny the purchase of guns to anyone on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist. It wasn’t a new proposal, but one whipped out whenever hysteria presents an opportunity.

The measure has been introduced repeatedly since 2007. The Government Accountability Office has documented that over years of congressional blockage, hundreds of suspected terrorists on the watchlist bought guns.

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